y Bates, and Mr. Crinkle and Miss Squeers
and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to
vanish with Menander's men and women! We cannot think of our world
without them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more
essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn
flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms.' Nor is this
all. He is almost prepared to welcome 'free education,' since 'every
Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more' for
Dickens. Does it not give one pause to reflect that the writer of this
charming eulogy can only read the half of Dickens, and is half the ideal
of his own denunciation.

His Method.

Dickens's imagination was diligent from the outset; with him conception
was not less deliberate and careful than development; and so much he
confesses when he describes himself as 'in the first stage of a new book,
which consists in going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in
his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it.' 'I have no
means,' he writes to a person wanting advice, 'of knowing whether you are
patient in the pursuit of this art; but I am inclined to think that you
are not, and that you do not discipline yourself enough. When one is
impelled to write this or that, one has still to consider: "How much of
this will tell for what I mean? How much of it is my own wild emotion
and superfluous energy--how much remains that is truly belonging to this
ideal character and these ideal circumstances?" It is in the laborious
struggle to make this distinction, and in the determination to try for
it, that the road to the correction of faults lies. [Perhaps I may
remark, in support of the sincerity with which I write this, that I am an
impatient and impulsive person myself, but that it has been for many
years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preach
to you.]' Such golden words could only have come from one enamoured of
his art, and holding the utmost endeavour in its behalf of which his
heart and mind were capable for a matter of simple duty. They are a
proof that Dickens--in intention at least, and if in intention then
surely, the fact of his genius being admitted, to some extent in fact as
well--was an artist in the best sense of the term.

His Development.

In the beginning he often wrote exceeding ill, especially when he was
doing his best to