and but for the defects of my education should be ready to play it.
I am willing to ride on a donkey; that is, if the donkey is willing.
I am willing to be a donkey; for all this was commanded me
by the angel in the stained-glass window."

"I really think," said the Dickensian, "that I had better put
you in charge of your relations."

"Sir," I answered, "there are certain writers to whom humanity
owes much, whose talent is yet of so shy or delicate or retrospective
a type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places
or certain perishing associations. It would not be unnatural
to look for the spirit of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill,
or even for the shade of Thackeray in Old Kensington.
But let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens, for Dickens
is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward, but forward;
he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury,
but he would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy,
but it would be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it.
We will not have all his books bound up under the title
of 'The Old Curiosity Shop.' Rather we will have them
all bound up under the title of 'Great Expectations.'
Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make
something of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism,
and assimilate it with the digestion of a giant. We must
take these trippers as he would have taken them, and tear
out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do you remember
now what the angel said at the sepulchre? 'Why seek ye the
living among the dead? He is not here; he is risen.'"