bursting out afresh as though the sense of the ridiculous overwhelmed
him like a tide, which carried all hearers away with it, and which
I well remember. His enthusiasm was boundless. It entered into
everything he said or did. It belonged doubtless to that amazing
fertility and wealth of ideas and feeling that distinguished his
genius.

No one having any knowledge of the profession of literature can read
Dickens's private letters and not stand amazed at the unbounded
affluence of imagery, sentiment, humour, and keen observation which
he poured out in them. There was no stint, no reservation for trade
purposes. So with his conversation--every thought, every fancy, every
feeling was expressed with the utmost vivacity and intensity, but a
vivacity and intensity compatible with the most singular delicacy and
nicety of touch when delicacy and nicety of touch were needed.

What were called the exaggerations of his writing were due, I have no
doubt, to the extraordinary luminosity of his imagination. He saw and
rendered such an individuality as Mr. Pecksniff's or Mrs. Nickleby's
for instance, something after the same fashion as a solar microscope
renders any object observed through it. The world in general beholds
its Pecksniffs and its Mrs. Nicklebys through a different medium. And
at any rate Dickens got at the quintessence of his creatures, and
enables us all, in our various measures, to perceive it too. The proof
of this is that we are constantly not only quoting the sayings and
doings of his immortal characters, but are recognising other sayings
and doings as what _they_ would have said or done.

But it is impossible for one who knew him as I did to confine what
he remembers of him either to traits of outward appearance or to
appreciations of his genius. I must say a few, a very few words of
what Dickens appeared to me as a man. I think that an epithet, which,
much and senselessly as it has been misapplied and degraded, is yet,
when rightly used, perhaps the grandest that can be applied to a human
being, was especially applicable to him. He was a _hearty_ man, a
large-hearted man that is to say. He was perhaps the largest-hearted
man I ever knew. I think he made a nearer approach to obeying the
divine precept, "Love thy neighbour as thyself," than one man in a
hundred thousand. His benevolence, his active, energising desire for
good to all God's creatures, and restless anxiety to be in some way
active for the achievin