the pity. A favorite humorous device in his
style is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident as
where, for example, Mr. Roker "muttered certain unpleasant invocations
concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;" or where the
drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr.
Smangle "a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that
his audience were not musically disposed." This manner was original
with Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock
heroic language of _Jonathan Wild_; but as practiced by a thousand
imitators, ever since, it has gradually become a burden.

It would not be the whole truth to say that the {272} difference
between the humor of Thackeray and Dickens is the same as between that
of Shakspere and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the "humors" of Ben
Jonson have an analogy with the extremer instances of Dickens's
character sketches in this respect, namely: that they are both studies
of the eccentric, the abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the
typical and universal--studies of manners, rather than of whole
characters. And it is easily conceivable that, at no distant day, the
oddities of Captain Cuttle, Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and
Newman Noggs will seem as far-fetched and impossible as those of
Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk, and Sir Amorous La-Foole.

When Dickens was looking about for some one to take Seymour's place as
illustrator of Pickwick, Thackeray applied for the job, but without
success. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating
between art and literature. He had begun to draw caricatures with his
pencil when a schoolboy at the Charter House, and to scribble them with
his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing _The Snob_, a weekly
under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize poem _Timbuctoo_ of his
contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. Then he went abroad
to study art, passing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and
filled the albums of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward
living, in the Latin Quarter at Paris, a Bohemian existence, studying
art in a desultory way, and seeing men and cities; {273} accumulating
portfolios full of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be
used afterward to greater advantage when he should settle upon his true
medium of expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of 500 pounds a
year in speculation