phy as a design to show that any man's life
may be as a mirror of existence to all men, and the individual career
becomes altogether secondary to the variety of experiences received and
rendered back in it. This particular form in imaginative literature has
too often led to the indulgence of mental analysis, metaphysics, and
sentiment, all in excess: but Dickens was carried safely over these
allurements by a healthy judgment and sleepless creative fancy; and even
the method of his narrative is more simple here than it generally is in
his books. His imaginative growths have less luxuriance of underwood,
and the crowds of external images always rising so vividly before him
are more within control.

Consider Copperfield thus in his proper place in the story, and sequence
as well as connection will be given to the varieties of its childish
adventure. The first warm nest of love in which his vain fond mother,
and her quaint kind servant, cherish him; the quick-following contrast
of hard dependence and servile treatment; the escape from that premature
and dwarfed maturity by natural relapse into a more perfect childhood;
the then leisurely growth of emotions and faculties into manhood; these
are component parts of a character consistently drawn. The sum of its
achievement is to be a successful cultivation of letters; and often as
such imaginary discipline has been the theme of fiction, there are not
many happier conceptions of it. The ideal and real parts of the boy's
nature receive development in the proportions which contribute best to
the end desired; the readiness for impulsive attachments that had put
him into the leading of others, has underneath it a base of truthfulness
on which at last he rests in safety; the practical man is the outcome of
the fanciful youth; and a more than equivalent for the graces of his
visionary days, is found in the active sympathies that life has opened
to him. Many experiences have come within its range, and his heart has
had room for all. Our interest in him cannot but be increased by knowing
how much he expresses of what the author had himself gone through; but
David includes far less than this, and infinitely more.

That the incidents arise easily, and to the very end connect themselves
naturally and unobtrusively with the characters of which they are a
part, is to be said perhaps more truly of this than of any other of
Dickens's novels. There is a profusion of distinct and distinguishabl