The people
who will not laugh with Pierrot because his jokes are so silly, and
the people who will not cry with Columbine because her legs are so
thin, may be shrewd psychologists and fastidious artists--but, God
help them! they are not in the game.

The romance of city-life is one thing. The romance of a particular
city leads us further. Dickens has managed to get the inner identity
of London; what is permanent in it; what can be found nowhere else;
as not even Balzac got hold of Paris. London is terrible and ghastly.
One knows that; but the wretchedest of its "gamins" knows that it is
something else also. More than any place on earth it seems to have
that weight, that mass, that depth, that foursquare solidity, which
reassures and comforts, in the midst of the illusions of life. It
descends so far, with its huge human foundations, that it gives one
the impression of a monstrous concrete Base, sunk into eternity,
upon which, for all its accumulated litter and debris, man will be
able to build, perhaps has begun already, to build, his Urbs Beata.
And Dickens entered with dramatic clairvoyance into every secret of
this Titanic mystery. He knew its wharfs, its bridges, its viaducts, its
alleys, its dens, its parks, its squares, its churches, its morgues, its
circuses, its prisons, its hospitals, and its mad-houses. And as the
human atoms of that fantastic, gesticulating, weeping, grinning
crowd of his dance their crazy "Carmagnole," we cannot but feel
that somehow we _must_ gather strength and friendliness enough to
applaud such a tremendous Performance.

Dickens was too great a genius to confine his demonic touch to the
town alone. There are _suggestions_ of his, relating to country roads
and country Inns and country solitudes, like nothing else, except,
perhaps, the Vignettes of Bewick. He carries the same "animism"
into this also. And he notes and records sensations of the most
evasive kind. The peculiar terror we feel, for instance, mixed with a
sort of mad pity, when by chance we light upon some twisted
root-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. The
vague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of a
lonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, or
tumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that in
some weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy,
are feelings that Dickens alone among writers seems to understand.
A road with