of
the cants of critical superiority to make supercilious mention of the
serious passages in this great writer; but the storm and shipwreck at
the close of _Copperfield_, when the body of the seducer is flung dead
upon the shore amid the ruins of the home he has wasted and by the side
of the man whose heart he has broken, the one as unconscious of what he
had failed to reach as the other of what he has perished to save, is a
description that may compare with the most impressive in the language.
There are other people drawn into this catastrophe who are among the
failures of natural delineation in the book. But though Miss Dartle is
curiously unpleasant, there are some natural traits in her (which
Dickens's least life-like people are never without); and it was from one
of his lady friends, very familiar to him indeed, he copied her
peculiarity of never saying anything outright, but hinting it merely,
and making more of it that way. Of Mrs. Steerforth it may also be worth
remembering that Thackeray had something of a fondness for her. "I knew
how it would be when I began," says a pleasant letter all about himself
written immediately after she appeared in the story. "My letters to my
mother are like this, but then she likes 'em--like Mrs. Steerforth:
don't you like Mrs. Steerforth?"

Turning to another group there is another elderly lady to be liked
without a shadow of misgiving; abrupt, angular, extravagant, but the
very soul of magnanimity and rectitude; a character thoroughly made out
in all its parts; a gnarled and knotted piece of female timber, sound to
the core; a woman Captain Shandy would have loved for her startling
oddities, and who is linked to the gentlest of her sex by perfect
womanhood. Dickens has done nothing better, for solidness and truth all
round, than Betsey Trotwood. It is one of her oddities to have a fool
for a companion; but this is one of them that has also most pertinence
and wisdom. By a line thrown out in _Wilhelm Meister_, that the true way
of treating the insane was, in all respects possible, to act to them as
if they were sane, Goethe anticipated what it took a century to apply to
the most terrible disorder of humanity; and what Mrs. Trotwood does for
Mr. Dick goes a step farther, by showing how often asylums might be
dispensed with, and how large might be the number of deficient
intellects manageable with patience in their own homes. Characters
hardly less distinguishable for truth as well