istinguished of Carlyle's contemporaries, the great
men of letters of the mid-nineteenth century, have left letters more or
less copious and more or less valuable from one or both of the two
sides, biographical and literary, but not eminently so. Macaulay's
letters and diaries suit biography excellently, and have been
excellently used in his. They lighten and sweeten the rather boisterous
"cocksureness" of the published writings: and help his few but very
remarkable poems other than the _Lays_ (which are excellent but in a
different kind) to show the soul and heart of the man as apart from his
mere intellect. But they are not perhaps intrinsically very capital. So
also in Dickens's case the "Life-and-Letters" system is excellently
justified, but one does not know that the letters in themselves would
always deserve a first class in this particular school of _Literae
Humaniores_. Letter-writing admits--if it may not even require--a
certain kind of egotism. But it must be what the French call an _Egoisme
a plusieurs_--a temper which takes, if only for the moment, other people
into itself and cares for them there. "The Inimitable" was perhaps too
generally thinking of that Inimitable himself or of the fictitious
creations of his marvellous genius. If, like his own Mr. Toots, he could
have written some letters to or from _them_ it would have been a very
different thing. In this respect he does not, as in others he does,
resemble Balzac, whose egotism was in a way as intense as his own and
like it extended to his creations, but could extend farther: while the
contrast with Thackeray is even more salient than in other cases from
this same point of view. At the same time it must not be supposed that
there is any intention here of belittling Dickens, either as a
letter-writer or in any other way. It is only suggested that he lacks
one of the things necessary to perfect letter-writing. Perhaps his most
noteworthy productions in the style are his editorial criticisms--rather
limited in taste and purview, but singularly shrewd within other limits.
And many of the others tell their substance with that faculty of
"telling" which he possessed as few have ever done, while the comedy of
those given here is "the true Dickens."

[Sidenote: SOME NOVELISTS]

Mention of the three greatest novelists (English and French) of the
mid-nineteenth century naturally suggests the rest of a class so
predominant in that century's literary production.