grotesque, of a range and volume rarely equalled,
and of a quality which stands entirely by itself, or is approached at a
distance, and with a difference, only by that of his great French
contemporary Balzac. This imagination, essentially plastic, so far
outran the strictly critical knowledge of mankind as mankind just
mentioned that it has invested Dickens' books and characters with a
peculiarity found nowhere else, or only in the instance just excepted.
They are never quite real: we never experience or meet anything or
anybody quite like them in the actual world. And yet in their own world
they hold their position and play their parts quite perfectly and
completely: they obey their own laws, they are consistent with their own
surroundings. Occasionally the work is marred by too many and too
glaring tricks of mannerism: this was especially the case with the
productions of the period between 1855 and 1865. The pathos of Dickens
was always regarded as slightly conventional and unreal by critical
judges. But his humour, though never again attaining the same marvellous
flow of unforced merriment which the _Pickwick Papers_ had shown, was
almost unfailing; and, thanks to the gift of projecting imaginative
character, above noticed, it was never exactly the same.

These and other gifts were shown in a long line of novels covering just
thirty years, from _Boz to Our Mutual Friend_; for the last few years of
his life, disturbed by his American tour, by increasing ill-health, and
other things, produced nothing but the beginnings of an unfinished
novel, _Edwin Drood_. He attempted little besides novels, and what he
did attempt outside of them was not very fortunate, except the
delightful _Uncommercial Traveller_, wherein in his later days he
achieved a sort of mellowed version of the _Boz_ sketches, subdued more
to the actual, but not in the least tamed or weakened. Although a keen
lover of the theatre and an amateur actor of remarkable merit, he had
the sense and self-denial never to attempt plays except in an indirect
fashion and in one or two instances, nor ever in his own name solely.
His _Child's History of England_ (1854) is probably the worst book ever
written by a man of genius, except Shelley's novels, and has not, like
them, the excuse of extreme youth. His _Pictures from Italy_ (1845),
despite vivid passages, are quite unworthy of him; and even the
_American Notes_ could be dispensed with without a sigh, seeing that we