the few persons who ever really mastered it. But few of Dickens's
books are written in a more admirable style.

_Master Humphrey's Clock_ concluded, Dickens started in 1842 on his
first visit to America--an episode hitherto without parallel in English
literary history, for he was received everywhere with popular
acclamation as the representative of a grand triumph of the English
language and imagination, without regard to distinctions of nationality.
He offended the American public grievously by a few words of frank
description and a few quotations of the advertisement columns of
American papers illustrating the essential barbarity of the old slave
system (_American Notes_). Dickens was soon pining for home--no English
writer is more essentially and insularly English in inspiration and
aspiration than he is. He still brooded over the perverseness of America
on the copyright question, and in his next book he took the opportunity
of uttering a few of his impressions about the objectionable sides of
American democracy, the result being that "all Yankee-doodle-dom blazed
up like one universal soda bottle," as Carlyle said. _Martin Chuzzlewit_
(1843-1844) is important as closing his great character period. His
_seve originale_, as the French would say, was by this time to a
considerable extent exhausted, and he had to depend more upon artistic
elaboration, upon satires, upon _tours de force_ of description, upon
romantic and ingenious contrivances. But all these resources combined
proved unequal to his powers as an original observer of popular types,
until he reinforced himself by autobiographic reminiscence, as in _David
Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_, the two great books remaining to
his later career.

After these two masterpieces and the three wonderful books with which he
made his debut, we are inclined to rank _Chuzzlewit_. Nothing in Dickens
is more admirably seen and presented than Todgers's, a bit of London
particular cut out with a knife. Mr Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, Betsy Prig
and "Mrs Harris" have passed into the national language and life. The
coach journey, the windy autumn night, the stealthy trail of Jonas, the
undertone of tragedy in the Charity and Mercy and Chuffey episodes
suggest a blending of imaginative vision and physical penetration hardly
seen elsewhere. Two things are specially notable about this novel--the
exceptional care taken over it (as shown by the interlineations in the
MS.) and the ca