just as we forget the melodramatics of "Martin Chuzzlewit." I have
read in that book a score of times; I never see it but I revel in
it--in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and the Americans. But what the
plot is all about, what Jonas did, what Montagu Tigg had to make in
the matter, what all the pictures with plenty of shading illustrate,
I have never been able to comprehend. In the same way, one of your
most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the licence of private
conversation) that "Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;" and
probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little
precipitous.

"Too steep:"--the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius,
carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its
grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to
press fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the
indigo, that was the failing which proved you mortal. To take an
instance in little: when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy
thought the seedsman "a very happy man to have so many little
drawers in his shop." The reflection is thoroughly boyish; but then
you add, "I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted
of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom." That is not
boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at
work.

"So we arraign her; but she," the Genius of Charles Dickens, how
brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain
of laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt
in the neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy
would be, how "dispeopled of her dreams," if, in some ruin of the
social system, the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger,