arried life between his happiness
enjoyed and his happiness once anticipated, the "vague unhappy loss or
want of something" of which he so frequently complains, reflected also a
personal experience which had not been supplied in fact so successfully
as in fiction. (A closing word may perhaps be allowed, to connect with
Devonshire-terrace the last book written there. On the page opposite is
engraved a drawing by Maclise of the house where so many of Dickens's
masterpieces were composed, done on the first anniversary of the day
when his daughter Kate was born.)

_Bleak House_ followed _Copperfield_, which in some respects it copied
in the autobiographical form by means of extracts from the personal
relation of its heroine. But the distinction between the narrative of
David and the diary of Esther, like that between Micawber and Skimpole,
marks the superiority of the first to its successor. To represent a
storyteller as giving the most surprising vividness to manners, motives,
and characters of which we are to believe her, all the time, as
artlessly unconscious, as she is also entirely ignorant of the good
qualities in herself she is naively revealing in the story, was a
difficult enterprise, full of hazard in any case, not worth success,
and certainly not successful. Ingenuity is more apparent than freshness,
the invention is neither easy nor unstrained, and though the old
marvellous power over the real is again abundantly manifest, there is
some alloy of the artificial. Nor can this be said of Esther's relation
without some general application to the book of which it forms so large
a part. The novel is nevertheless, in the very important particular of
construction, perhaps the best thing done by Dickens.

[Illustration: DEVONSHIRE TERRACE.]

In his later writings he had been assiduously cultivating this essential
of his art, and here he brought it very nearly to perfection. Of the
tendency of composing a story piecemeal to induce greater concern for
the part than for the whole, he had been always conscious; but I
remember a remark also made by him to the effect that to read a story in
parts had no less a tendency to prevent the reader's noticing how
thoroughly a work so presented might be calculated for perusal as a
whole. Look back from the last to the first page of the present novel,
and not even in the highest examples of this kind of elaborate care will
it be found, that event leads more closely to event, or that t