garded as the central point and the
culmination of Dickens's career as a novelist. Before it, and again
after it, he had a spell of about fifteen years' steady work at novel
writing, and no one would question that the first spell was productive
of the better work. _Bleak House_, _Hard Times_, _Little Dorrit_, _Our
Mutual Friend_ all show evidence of greater effort and are less happy in
their effect. No man could live the life that Dickens had lived for
fifteen years and not show some signs of exhaustion; the wonder is that
his creative power continued at all. He was capable of brilliant
successes yet. _The Tale of Two Cities_ is among the most thrilling of
his stories, while _Edwin Drood_ and parts of _Great Expectations_ show
as fine imagination and character drawing as anything which he wrote
before 1850; but there is no injustice in drawing a broad distinction
between the two parts of his career.

His home during the most fertile period of his activity was in
Devonshire Terrace, near Regent's Park, a house with a garden of
considerable size. Here he was within reach of his best friends, who
were drawn from all the liberal professions represented in London. First
among them stands John Forster, lawyer, journalist, and author, his
adviser and subsequently his biographer, the friend of Robert Browning,
a man with a genius for friendship, unselfish, loyal, discreet and wise
in counsel. Next came the artists Maclise and Clarkson Stanfield, the
actor Macready, Talfourd, lawyer and poet, Douglas Jerrold and Mark
Lemon, the two famous contributors to _Punch_, and some fellow
novelists, of whom Harrison Ainsworth was conspicuous in the earlier
group and Wilkie Collins in later years. Less frequent visitors were
Carlyle, Thackeray, and Bulwer Lytton, but they too were proud to
welcome Dickens among their friends. With some of these he would walk,
ride, or dine, go to the theatre or travel in the provinces and in
foreign countries. His biographer loves to recall the Dickens Dinners,
organized to celebrate the issue of a new book, when songs and speeches
were added to good cheer and when 'we all in the greatest good-humour
glorified each other'. Dickens always retained the English taste for a
good dinner and was frankly fond of applause, and there was no element
of exclusive priggishness about the cordial admiration which these
friends felt for one another and their peculiar enthusiasm for Dickens
and his books. Around him the e