t has been written in the last sixty years, and you must have
been bred on a desert island. Dickens has a living part in the life of
the whole wide world. He is on a hundred thousand magisterial benches
every day. There is not a hospital patient in any country who has not
at this minute a right to thank God that Dickens lived. What his blessed
and bountiful hand has done for the poor and oppressed, and them
that had no helper, no man knows. He made charity and good feeling a
religion. Millions and millions of money have flowed from the coffers of
the rich for the benefit of the poor because of his books. A great part
of our daily life, and a good deal of the best of it, is of his making.

No single man ever made such opportunities for himself. No single man
was ever so widely and permanently useful. No single man ever sowed
gentleness and mercy with so broad a sweep.

This is all true, and very far from new, but it has not been the fashion
to say it lately. It is not the whole of the truth. Noble rivers have
their own natural defects of swamp and mudbank. Sometimes his tides ran
sluggishly, as in 'The Battle of Life,' for example, which has always
seemed to me, at least, a most mawkish and unreal book. The pure stream
of 'The Carol,' which washes the heart of a man, runs thin in 'The
Chimes,' runs thinner in 'The Haunted Man,' and in 'The Battle of Life'
is lees and mud. 'Nickleby,' again, is a young man's book, and as full
of blemishes as of genius. But when all is said and done, it killed the
Yorkshire schools.

The chief fault the superficial modern critic has to find with Dickens
is a sort of rumbustious boisterousness in the expression of emotion.
But let one thing be pointed out, and let me point it out in my own
fashion. Tom Hood, who was a true poet, and the best of our English
wits, and probably as good a judge of good work as any person now alive,
went home after meeting with Dickens, and in a playful enthusiasm told
his wife to cut off his hand and bottle it, because it had shaken hands
with Boz. Lord Jeffrey, who was cold as a critic, cried over little
Nell. So did Sydney Smith, who was very far from being a blubbering
sentimentalist. To judge rightly of any kind of dish you must bring
an appetite to it. Here is the famous Dickens pie, when first served,
pronounced inimitable, not by a class or a clique, but by all men in
all lands. But you get it served hot, and you get it served cold, it is
rehashed in e