comic literature there is no indistinctness. Indeed, the objection that
has been made to him is that his characters are too distinct--that he
puts labels on them; that they are often mere personifications of a
single trick of speech or manner, which becomes tedious and unnatural by
repetition. Thus, Grandfather Smallweed is always settling down into his
cushion, and having to be shaken up; Mr. Jellyby is always sitting with
his head against the wall; Peggotty is always bursting her buttons off,
etc. As Dickens's humorous characters tend perpetually to run into
caricatures and grotesques, so his sentiment, from the same excess,
slops over too frequently into "gush," and into a too deliberate and
protracted attack upon the pity. A favorite humorous device in his style
is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident, as where,
for example, Mr. Roker "muttered certain unpleasant invocations
concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;" or where the
drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr.
Smangle "a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that
his audience were not musically disposed." This manner was original with
Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock heroic
language of _Jonathan Wild_; but as practiced by a thousand imitators,
ever since, it has gradually become a burden.

It would not be the whole truth to say that the difference between the
humor of Thackeray and Dickens is the same as between that of Shakspere
and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the "humors" of Ben Jonson have an
analogy with the extremer instances of Dickens's character sketches in
this respect, namely, that they are both studies of the eccentric, the
abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the typical and universal;
studies of manners, rather than of whole characters. And it is easily
conceivable that, at no distant day, the oddities of Captain Cuttle,
Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and Newman Noggs will seem as
far-fetched and impossible as those of Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk
and Sir Amorous La-Foole.

When Dickens was looking about for some one to take Seymour's place as
illustrator of _Pickwick_, Thackeray applied for the job, but without
success. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating
between art and literature. He had begun to draw caricatures with his
pencil when a school-boy at the Charter House, and to scribble them wi