"in my 'teens." That period included the first ten of the main works
from _Pickwick_ down to _David Copperfield_. With _Bleak House_, which
I read as a student of philosophy at Oxford beginning to be familiar
with Aristotelian canons, I felt my enjoyment mellowed by a somewhat
more measured judgment. From that time onward Charles Dickens threw
himself into a great variety of undertakings and many diverse kinds of
publication. His _Hard Times_, _Little Dorrit_, _Our Mutual Friend_,
_Great Expectations_, _Tale of Two Cities_, were never to me anything
like the wonder and delight that I found in Oliver Twist, Nickleby, and
Copperfield. And as to the short tales and the later pieces down to
_Edwin Drood_, I never find myself turning back to them; the very
memory of the story is fading away; and I fail to recall the characters
and names. A mature judgment will decide that the series after _David
Copperfield_, written when the author was thirty-eight, was not equal
to the series of the thirteen years preceding. Charles Dickens will
always be remembered by _Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, _Nickleby_, and
_Copperfield_. And though these tales will long continue to delight
both old and young, learned and unlearned alike, they are most to be
envied who read him when young, and they are most to be pitied who read
him with a critical spirit. May that be far from us, as we take up our
_Pickwick_ and talk over the autobiographic pathos of _David
Copperfield_.

This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in
that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him,
was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some
of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work. Though I
never spoke to him, there were times when I saw him almost daily; I
heard him speak and read in public; and his favourite haunts in London
and the country have been familiar to me from my boyhood. And thus, as