and bottomless Babylon; which,
perhaps, no man has ever known so well as did Charles Dickens. This
was his library: here he gathered that vast encyclopaedia of human
nature, which some are inclined to call "cockney," but if it be,
"Cockayne" must be a very large country indeed. Still, the fact
remains, that of book-learning of any kind Dickens remained, to the end
of his days, perhaps more utterly innocent than any other famous
English writer since Shakespeare. His biographer labours to prove that
he had read Fielding and Smollett, _Don Quixote_ and _Gil Blas_, _The
Spectator_, and _Robinson Crusoe_. Perhaps he had, like most men who
have learned to read. But, no doubt, this utter severance from books,
which we feel in his tales, will ultimately tell against their
immortality.

This rigid abstinence from books, which Dickens practised on system,
had another reaction that we notice in his style. Not only do we feel
in reading his novels that we have no reason to assume that he had ever
read anything except a few popular romances, but we note that he can
hardly be said to have a formed literary style of his own. Dickens had
mannerisms, but hardly a style. In some ways, this is a good thing:
much less can he be said to have a bad style. It is simply no style.
He knows nothing of the crisp, modulated, balanced, and reserved
mastery of phrase and sentence which marks Thackeray. Nor is it the
easy simplicity of _Robinson Crusoe_ and the _Vicar of Wakefield_. The
tale spins along, and the incidents rattle on with the volubility of a
good story-teller who warms up as he goes, but who never stops to think
of his sentences and phrases. He often gets verbose, rings the changes
on a point which he sees to have caught his hearers; he plays with a
fancy out of measure, and turns his jest inside out and over and over,
like a fine comic actor when the house is in a roar. His language is
free, perfectly clear, often redundant, sometimes grandiloquent, and
usually addressed more to the pit than to the boxes. And he is a
little prone to slide, even in his own proper person, into those formal
courtesies and obsolete compliments which forty years ago survived
amongst the superior orders of bagmen and managing clerks.

There is an old topic of discussion whether Dickens could invent an
organic and powerful plot, and carry out an elaborate scheme with
perfect skill. It is certain that he has never done so, and it can
hardly