-tragedy, and depicts the changing fashions of the time. The color
is sometimes a little crude, laid on occasionally with too coarse a
brush; but the effect is always lifelike, and our interest in it is
never known to flag.

Nowhere else in all the range of literature have we such tender
description of home life and love, such intuitive knowledge of child
life, such wonderful sympathy with every form of domestic wrong and
suffering, such delicate appreciation of the shyest and most unobtrusive
of social virtues; nowhere else such indignation at any neglect or
desecration of the home, as in Mrs. Jellyby with her mission, in Mrs.
Pardiggle with her charities, Mr. Pecksniff with his hypocrisy, and Mr.
Dombey with his unfeeling selfishness. In short, Dickens is
pre-eminently the prophet and the poet of the home.

Now, can it be possible that we must say of such a man as this, that in
his own life he was the opposite of all that which he so feelingly
describes,--that he desecrated the very home he so apostrophizes,--that
he put all his warmth, geniality, and tenderness into his books and kept
for his own fireside his sour humors and unhappy moods,--that he was
"ill to live with," as Mrs. Carlyle puts it? We cannot believe it in so
bald a form, but we are forced to admit that his married life seems to
have been in every way unhappy and unfortunate. No one could state this
more strongly than Dickens himself, in the letter he wrote at the time
of the separation. He said:--

"Mrs. Dickens and I have lived unhappily for many years. Hardly any
one who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are
in all respects of character and temperament wonderfully unsuited
to each other. I suppose that no two people, not vicious in
themselves, were ever joined together, who had greater difficulty
in understanding one another, or who had less in common. An
attached woman-servant (more friend to both of us than servant),
who lived with us sixteen years and had the closest familiar
experience of this unhappiness in London, in the country, in
France, in Italy, wherever we have been, year after year, month
after month, week after week, day after day, will bear testimony to
this. Nothing has on many occasions stood between us and a
separation but Mrs. Dickens's sister, Georgina Hogarth. From the
age of fifteen, she has devoted herself to our home and our
chil