unhappy Sittingbourne railway accident, he might be with us now full
of years and honours. When he did suffer himself to be worked to a low
ebb for a time, his writing was very bad. Even in the flush of his
youth, when he was persuaded to write "Oliver Twist" in a hurry, he
fell far below his own standard. I have lately read the book after
many years, and while I find nearly all the comic parts admirable,
some of the serious portions strike me as being so curiously stilted
and bad that I can hardly bring myself to believe that Dickens touched
them. An affectionate student of his books can almost always account
for the bad patches in Dickens by collating the novels with the
letters and diary. Much of the totally nauseating gush of the Brothers
Cheeryble must have been turned out only by way of stop-gap; and there
are passages in "Little Dorrit" which may have been done speedily
enough by the author, but which no one of my acquaintance can reckon
as bearable. Dickens saw the danger of exhausting himself before he
reached fifty-four years of age, and tried to repair damages inflicted
by past excesses; but he was too late, and though "Edwin Drood" was
quite in his best manner, he could not keep up the effort--and we lost
him.

As for the dismal hacks who sometimes call themselves journalists, I
cannot grow angry with them; but they do test the patience of the most
stolid of men. To call them writers--_écrivains_--would be worse than
flattery; they are paper-stainers, and every fresh dribble of their
incompetence shows how utterly written out they are. Let them have a
noble action to describe, or let them have a world-shaking event given
them as subject for comment, the same deadly mechanical dulness marks
the description and the article. Look at an article by Forbes or
McGahan or Burleigh--an article wherein the words seem alive--and then
run over a doleful production of some complacent hack, and the