re the Great) could write so much, and
yet all good? Do we not all feel that "David Copperfield" should have
been compressed? As to "Pendennis," Mr. Thackeray's bad health when he
wrote it might well cause a certain languor in the later pages. Moreover,
he frankly did not care for the story, and bluffly says, in the preface,
that he respited Colonel Altamont almost at the foot of the gallows.
Dickens took himself more in earnest, and, having so many pages to fill,
conscientiously made Uriah Heap wind and wriggle through them all.

To try to see blots in the sun, and to pick holes in Dickens, seems
ungrateful, and is indeed an ungrateful task; to no mortal man have more
people owed mirth, pleasure, forgetfulness of care, knowledge of life in
strange places. There never was such another as Charles Dickens, nor
shall we see his like sooner than the like of Shakespeare. And he owed
all to native genius and hard work; he owed almost nothing to literature,
and that little we regret. He was influenced by Carlyle, he adopted his
method of nicknames, and of hammering with wearisome iteration on some
peculiarity--for example, on Carker's teeth, and the patriarch's white
hair. By the way, how incredible is all the Carker episode in "Dombey"!
Surely Dickens can never have intended Edith, from the first, to behave
as she did! People may have influenced him, as they influenced Scott
about "St. Ronan's Well." It has been said that, save for Carlyle,
Dickens was in letters a self-taught artist, that he was no man's pupil,
and borrowed from none. No doubt this makes him less acceptable to the
literary class than a man of letters, like Thackeray--than a man in whose
treasure chamber of memory all the wealth of the Middle Ages was stored,
like Scott. But the native naked genius of Dickens,--his heart, his
mirth, his observation, his delightful high spirits, his intrepid
loathing of wrong, his chivalrous desire to right it,--these things will
make him for ever, we hope and believe, the darling of the English
people.

ADVENTURES OF BUCCANEERS

Most of us, as boys, have envied the buccaneers. The greatest of all
boys, Canon Kingsley, once wrote a pleasing and regretful poem in which
the Last Buccaneer represents himself as a kind of picturesque
philanthropist:--

"There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,
All furnished well with small arms, and cannons round about;
And a thousand men in A