in his Highgate garden, "as if they had been written to about him by the
Canterbury rooks and were observing him closely in consequence"; and of
Master Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice--"On looking at Master
Micawber again I saw that he had a certain expression of face as if his
voice were behind his eyebrows"; and of Joe in his Sunday clothes, "a
scarecrow in good circumstances"; and of the cook's cousin in the Life
Guards, with such long legs that "he looked like the afternoon shadow of
somebody else"; and of Mrs. Markleham, "who stared more like a figure-
head intended for a ship to be called the Astonishment, than anything
else I can think of." But there is no reader who has not a thousand such
exhilarating little sights in his memory of these pages. From the gently
grotesque to the fantastic run Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in Quilp and
Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and a
spontaneous combustion was an accident much to his mind.

Dickens wrote for a world that either was exceedingly excitable and
sentimental, or had the convention or tradition of great sentimental
excitability. All his people, suddenly surprised, lose their presence of
mind. Even when the surprise is not extraordinary their actions are
wild. When Tom Pinch calls upon John Westlock in London, after no very
long separation, John, welcoming him at breakfast, puts the rolls into
his boots, and so forth. And this kind of distraction comes upon men and
women everywhere in his books--distractions of laughter as well. All
this seems artificial to-day, whereas Dickens in his best moments is the
simplest, as he is the most vigilant, of men. But his public was as
present to him as an actor's audience is to the actor, and I cannot think
that this immediate response was good for his art. Assuredly he is not
solitary. We should not wish him to be solitary as a poet is, but we may
wish that now and again, even while standing applauded and acclaimed, he
had appraised the applause more coolly and more justly, and within his