l readers matter for facile sentiment and for
humour of the second order. His public were eager to be moved and to
laugh, and he gave them Little Nell and Sam Weller; he loved to please
them, and it is evident that he pleased himself also. Mr. Micawber, Mr.
Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Chick, Mrs. Pipchin, Mr. Augustus Moddle,
Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Plornish, are not so famous as Sam Weller and Little
Nell, nor is Traddles, whose hair looked as though he had seen a cheerful
ghost.

We are told of the delight of the Japanese man in a chance finding of
something strange-shaped, an asymmetry that has an accidental felicity,
an interest. If he finds such a grace or disproportion--whatever the
interest may be--in a stone or a twig that has caught his ambiguous eye
at the roadside, he carries it to his home to place it in its irregularly
happy place. Dickens seems to have had a like joy in things misshapen or
strangely shapen, uncommon or grotesque. He saddled even his
heroes--those heroes are, perhaps, his worst work, young men at once
conventional and improbable--with whimsically ugly names; while his
invented names are whimsically perfect: that of Vholes for the predatory
silent man in black, and that of Tope for the cathedral verger. A
suggestion of dark and vague flight in Vholes; something of old floors,
something respectably furtive and musty, in Tope. In Dickens, the love
of lurking, unusual things, human and inanimate--he wrote of his
discoveries delightedly in his letters--was hypertrophied; and it has its
part in the simplest and the most fantastic of his humours, especially
those that are due to his child-like eyesight; let us read, for example,
of the rooks that seemed to attend upon Dr. Strong (late of Canterbury)
in his Highgate garden, "as if they had been written to about him by the
Canterbury rooks and were observing him closely in consequence"; and of
Master Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice--"On looking at Master
Micawber again I saw that he had a certain expression of face as if his
voice were behind his eyebrows"; and of Joe in his Sunday clothes, "a
scarecrow in good circumstances"; and of the cook's cousin in the Life
Guards, with such long legs that "he looked like the afternoon shadow of
somebody else"; and of Mrs. Markleham, "who stared more like a figure-
head intended for a ship to be called the Astonishment, than anything
else I can think of." But there is no reader who has not a th