(not severely) the spikes upon the opposite wall." It should be
remembered that when Dickens shook himself free of everything that
hampered his genius he was not so much beloved or so much applauded as
when he gave to his cordial readers matter for facile sentiment and for
humour of the second order. His public were eager to be moved and to
laugh, and he gave them Little Nell and Sam Weller; he loved to please
them, and it is evident that he pleased himself also. Mr. Micawber, Mr.
Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Chick, Mrs. Pipchin, Mr. Augustus Moddle,
Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Plornish, are not so famous as Sam Weller and Little
Nell, nor is Traddles, whose hair looked as though he had seen a cheerful
ghost.

We are told of the delight of the Japanese man in a chance finding of
something strange-shaped, an asymmetry that has an accidental felicity,
an interest. If he finds such a grace or disproportion--whatever the
interest may be--in a stone or a twig that has caught his ambiguous eye
at the roadside, he carries it to his home to place it in its irregularly
happy place. Dickens seems to have had a like joy in things misshapen or
strangely shapen, uncommon or grotesque. He saddled even his
heroes--those heroes are, perhaps, his worst work, young men at once
conventional and improbable--with whimsically ugly names; while his
invented names are whimsically perfect: that of Vholes for the predatory
silent man in black, and that of Tope for the cathedral verger. A
suggestion of dark and vague flight in Vholes; something of old floors,
something respectably furtive and musty, in Tope. In Dickens, the love
of lurking, unusual things, human and inanimate--he wrote of his
discoveries delightedly in his letters--was hypertrophied; and it has its
part in the simplest and the most fantastic of his humours, especially
those that are due to his child-like eyesight; let us read, for example,
of the rooks that seemed to attend upon Dr. Strong (late of Canterbury)