t from _Pickwick_ onwards to _Edwin Drood_ the effort after
improvement is manifest. What are _Dombey_ and _Dorrit_ themselves but
the failures of a great and serious artist? In truth the man's genius
did but ripen with years and labour; he spent his life in developing from
a popular writer into an artist. He extemporised _Pickwick_, it may be,
but into _Copperfield_ and _Chuzzlewit_ and the _Tale of Two Cities_ and
_Our Mutual Friend_ he put his whole might, working at them with a
passion of determination not exceeded by Balzac himself. He had
enchanted the public without an effort; he was the best-beloved of modern
writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least
as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if
all his life he never ceased from self-education but went unswervingly in
pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his
conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise. We have been
told so often to train ourselves by studying the practice of workmen like
Gautier and Hugo and imitating the virtues of work like _Hernani_ and
_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ and _l'Education Sentimentale_--we have heard so
much of the aesthetic impeccability of Young France and the section of
Young England that affects its qualities and reproduces its fashions--that
it is hard to refrain from asking if, when all is said, we should not do
well to look for models nearer home? if in place of such moulds of form
as _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ we might not take to considering stuff like
_Rizpah_ and _Our Mutual Friend_?

Ave atque Vale.

Yes, he had many and grave faults. But so had Sir Walter and the good
Dumas; so, to be candid, had Shakespeare himself--Shakespeare the king of
poets. To myself he is always the man of his unrivalled and enchanting
letters--is always an incarnation of generous and abounding gaiety, a
type of beneficent earnestness, a great expression of intellectual vigour
and emotional vivacity. I love to remember that I came into the world
contemporaneously with some of his bravest work, and to reflect that even
as he was the inspiration of my boyhood so is he a delight of my middle
age. I love to think that while English literature endures he will be
remembered as one that loved his fellow-men, and did more to make them
happy and amiable than any other writer of his time.

THACKERAY

His Worshippers.

It is odd to note how op