over which there broods the mournful
impression of the foggy marshes of the Lower Thames; and _Our Mutual
Friend_ (1864-1865), in which the ooze and mud and slime of Rotherhithe,
its boatmen and loafers, are made to pervade the whole book with
cumulative effect. The general effect produced by the stories is,
however, very different. In the first case, the foreground was supplied
by autobiographical material of the most vivid interest, and the
lucidity of the creative impulse impelled him to write upon this
occasion with the old simplicity, though with an added power. Nothing
therefore, in the whole range of Dickens surpassed the early chapters of
_Great Expectations_ in perfection of technique or in mastery of all the
resources of the novelist's art. To have created Abel Magwitch alone is
to be a god indeed, says Mr Swinburne, among the creators of deathless
men. Pumblechook is actually better and droller and truer to imaginative
life than Pecksniff; Joe Gargery is worthy to have been praised and
loved at once by Fielding and by Sterne: Mr Jaggers and his clients, Mr
Wemmick and his parent and his bride, are such figures as Shakespeare,
when dropping out of poetry, might have created, if his lot had been
cast in a later century. "Can as much be said," Mr Swinburne boldly
asks, "for the creatures of any other man or god?"

In November 1867 Dickens made a second expedition to America, leaving
all the writing that he was ever to complete behind him. He was to make
a round sum of money, enough to free him from all embarrassments, by a
long series of exhausting readings, commencing at the Tremont Temple,
Boston, on the 2nd of December. The strain of Dickens's ordinary life
was so tense and so continuous that it is, perhaps, rash to assume that
he broke down eventually under this particular stress; for other
reasons, however, his persistence in these readings, subsequent to his
return, was strongly deprecated by his literary friends, led by the
arbitrary and relentless Forster. It is a long testimony to Dickens's
self-restraint, even in his most capricious and despotic moments, that
he never broke the cord of obligation which bound him to his literary
mentor, though sparring matches between them were latterly of frequent
occurrence. His farewell reading was given on the 15th of March 1870, at
St James's Hall. He then vanished from "those garish lights," as he
called them, "for evermore." Of the three brief months that remained