ts general
success to the faithful delineation of manners already passed away. He
was the prophet of the middle class, and the manners of that great
section of the community have greatly changed since the days when
Charles Dickens lived among them and observed them. With the decay of
these manners some part of present popularity must certainly pass out
of his work; already a generation has appeared to whom a great deal of
Dickens' work proves of no interest, because it portrays manners with
which they are not familiar. They do not laugh with those who laughed
fifty, forty, twenty years ago, because the people depicted have
vanished. But when the second quarter of this century shall belong so
truly to the past, that not one survives who can remember it, then
these books will become a precious storehouse for the study and the
recovery of part, and that a large part, of its life and manners.

Again, it is the essential quality of genius to create the type. In
this Dickens has been more successful than any other novelist, ancient
or modern. With him every leading character stands for his class.
Squeers is the representative of the schoolmaster, then too common,
ignorant, brutal, and grasping; Winkle is the Cockney sportsman; it is
impossible to think of red tape without naming Mr. Tite Barnacle; and
so on through all the books. If he sometimes too plainly labels his
characters with their qualities and defects, it is a fault caused by
his own clearness of conception and of execution. It is another note
of genius to suffer every character to work out its own fate without
weakness or pity, and though Dickens deals seldom with the greater
tragedies of the world in his domestic dramas, necessity pursues his
characters as grimly and certainly as in real life. The villain Quilp
and his tool make us forget, in the amusement which they cause, their
own baseness. But their creator is not deceived. He makes them bring
their own ruin upon their heads. To be true, not only to the outward
presentment and speech and thought of a character, but also to the
laws which surround him, and to the consequences of his actions, is a
rare thing indeed with those who practise the art of fiction. Further,
in this art there are permissible certain exaggerations, as upon the
stage. There is exaggeration of feature, exaggeration of talk,
exaggeration in action. There are degrees of exaggeration, by which
one passes through tragedy, comedy, farce, and bu