powerful picture, the engine made by the hand of man for peaceful purposes seems a living agent of wrath.'

No other of Dickens's books is more abundantly stocked than this with genuinely comic characters; but nearly all of them, in accordance with the pathetic tone which is struck at the outset, and which never dies out till the story has run its course, are in a more subdued strain of humour. Lord Jeffrey was, I think, warranted in his astonishment that Dickens should devote so much pains to characters like Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox. Probably the habit remained with him from his earliest times of authorship, when he had not always distinguished very accurately between the humorous and the bizarre. But Polly and the Toodles household, Mrs. Pipchin and her "select infantine boarding-house," and the whole of Doctor Blimber's establishment, from the Doctor himself down to Mr. Toots, and up again, in the scale of intellect, to Mr. Feeder, B.A., are among the most admirable of all the great humourist's creations. Against this ample provision for her poor little brother's nursing and training Florence has to set but her one Susan Nipper; but she is a host in herself, an absolutely original character among the thousands of soubrettes that are known to comedy and fiction, and one of the best tonic mixtures ever composed out of much humour and not a few grains of pathos. Her tartness has a cooling flavour of its own; but it is the Mrs. Pipchinses only

1 It is, perhaps, worth pointing out, though it is not surprising, that Dickens had a strong sense of what I may call the poetry of the railway-train. Of the effect of the weird Signalman's Story in one of his Christmas numbers it is not very easy to rid one's self. There are excellent descriptions of the rapidity of a railway journey in the first chapter of The Lazy Tour, and in another Household Words paper, called A Flight.

upon whom she acts, as their type acted upon her, “like early gooseberries." Of course she has a favourite figure of speech belonging to herself, which rhetoricians would probably class among the figures "working by surplusage:"

"Your Toxes and your Chickses may draw out my two front double teeth, Mrs. Richards, but that's no reason why I need offer 'em the whole set.'"

Dickens was to fall very largely into this habit of “labelling" his characters, as it has been called, by particular tricks or terms of speech; and there is a certain excess in this direction already in Dombey and Son, where not only Miss Nipper and Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots, but Major Bagstock too and Cousin Feenix, are thus furnished forth. But the invention is still so fresh and the play of humour so varied, that this mannerism cannot be said as yet seriously to disturb them. A romantic charm of a peculiar kind clings to honest Captain Cuttle and the quaint home over which he mounts guard during the absence of its owner. The nautical colouring and concomitant fun apart for only Smollett could have drawn Jack Bunsby's fellow, though the character in his hands would have been differently accentuated - Dickens has never approached more nearly to the manner of Sir Walter Scott than in this singularly attractive part of his book. Elsewhere the story passes into that sphere of society in describing which Dickens was, as a novelist, rarely very successful. But though Edith is cold and unreal, there is, it cannot be denied, human nature in the pigments and figments of her hideous old mother; and, to outward appearance at all events, the counterparts of her apoplectic admirer, Major Bagstock, still pace those pavements and promenades which it suits them to frequent. Cousin Feenix is like

wise very far from impossible, and is besides extremely delightful-and a good fellow too at bottom, so that the sting of the satire is here taken away. On the other hand, the meeting between the sacs et parchemins at Mr. Dombey's house is quite out of focus.

The book has other heights and depths, and pleasant and unpleasant parts and passages. But enough has been said to recall the exuberant creative force, and the marvellous strength of pathos and humour which Dombey and Son proves that Dickens, now near the very height of his powers as a writer of fiction, possessed. In one of his public readings many years afterwards, when he was reciting the adventures of Little Dombey, he narrates that "a very good fellow," whom he noticed in the stalls, could not refrain from wiping the tears out of his eyes as often as he thought that Toots was coming on. And just as Toots had become a reality to this good fellow, so Toots and Toots's little friend, and divers other personages in this story, have become realities to half the world that reads the English tongue, and to many besides. What higher praise could be given to this wonderful book? Of all the works of its author none has more powerfully and more permanently taken hold of the imagination of its readers. Though he conjured up only pictures familiar to us from the aspect of our own streets and our own homes, he too wielded a wizard's wand.

After the success of Dombey it might have seemed that nothing further was wanting to crown the prosperity of Dickens's literary career. While the publication of this story was in progress he had concluded arrangements for the issue of his collected writings, in a cheap edition, which began in the year 1847, and which he dedicated "to the English people, in whose approval, if the books be true

in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false, they will very soon die." He who could thus proudly appeal to posterity was already, beyond all dispute, the people's chosen favourite among its men of letters. That position he was not to lose so long as he lived; but even at this time the height had not been reached to which (in the almost unanimous judgment of those who love his writings) he was in his next work to attain.

CHAPTER IV.

"DAVID COPPERFIELD."

[1847-1851.]

THE five years, reckoned roughly, from the beginning of 1847 to the close of 1851, were most assuredly the season in which the genius of Dickens produced its richest and rarest fruit. When it opened he was still at work upon Dombey and Son; towards its end he was already engaged upon the earliest portions of Bleak House. And it was during the interval that he produced a book cherished by himself with an affection differing in kind, as well as in degree, from the common fondness of an author for his literary offspring, and a pearl without a peer amongst the later fictions of our English school-David Copperfield. To this period also belong, it is true, not a few lesser productions of the same ready pen; for the last of his Christmas books was written in 1848, and in 1850 his weekly periodical, Household Words, began to run its course. There was much play too in these busy years, but all more or less of the kind which his good-humoured self-irony afterwards very correctly characterised:

"Play!' said Thomas Idle. 'Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the champion's belt, and he calls it "Play." Play!' ex