by force, will never be blended with England; it would be as sensible
to say this "of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall." He was not, I think,
dead--he was certainly not dead long--when Wales actually did follow,
less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the
Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State.
As usual he goes to his books. He quotes Goethe--a great man of
letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except
Milton--to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes Burke--the
unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the French
Revolution had touched as it opened his eyes--to tell us what to do
with Ireland. But the main point in at least one of these essays, _The
Incompatibles_, is again connected with _David Copperfield_. I have
said that, from the merely literary point of view, the perpetual
ringing of the changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion--Quinion,
Murdstone, Creakle--is inartistic and irritating. But from the
philosophical and political point of view it is far worse. No
Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take,
Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic
exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual
reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest
companions in the art of line. Of the three figures selected in
particular, Creakle is a caricature; Murdstone, though not exactly
that, is a repulsive exception; and Quinion is so mere a _comparse_ or
"super" that to base any generalisation on him is absurd. The dislike
of the British public to be "talked book to" may be healthy or
unhealthy; but if it takes no great heed of this kind of talking book,
small blame to it! The same hopeless, not to say the same wilful,
neglect of the practical appears throughout. Mr Arnold (to his credit
be it said) had no great hopes of the Land Bill of 1881. But his own
panaceas--a sort of Cadi-court for "bag-and-baggaging" bad landlords,