chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening organ,
white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling
in a cracked monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard . . .
until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of
music. Then the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feeble
effort; and then the sea rose high and beat its life out, and lashed the
roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great
tower; and then the sea was dry and all was still." And this is how a
listener overheard men talking in the cathedral hollows: "The word
'confidence,' shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced
together, is uttered."

Wit, humour, derision--to each of these words we assign by custom a part
in the comedy of literature; and (again) those who do not read
Dickens--perhaps even those who read him a little--may acclaim him as a
humourist and not know him as a wit. But that writer is a wit, whatever
his humour, who tells us of a member of the Tite Barnacle family who had
held a sinecure office against all protest, that "he died with his drawn
salary in his hand." But let it be granted that Dickens the humourist is
foremost and most precious. For we might well spare the phrase of wit
just quoted rather than the one describing Traddles (whose hair stood
up), as one who looked "as though he had seen a cheerful ghost." Or
rather than this:-

He was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg
naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer that he might
be expected--if his development received no untimely check--to be
completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.

Or rather than the incident of the butcher and the beef-steak. He gently