, have been added by this book to the list of people
more intimately and permanently known to us than the scores of actual
familiar acquaintance whom we see around us living and dying.

But how do we know them? There are plenty to tell us that it is by
vividness of external observation rather than by depth of imaginative
insight, by tricks of manner and phrase rather than by truth of
character, by manifestation outwardly rather than by what lies behind.
Another opportunity will present itself for some remark on this kind of
criticism, which has always had a special pride in the subtlety of its
differences from what the world may have shown itself prone to admire.
"In my father's library," wrote Landor to Southey's daughter Edith,
"was the _Critical Review_ from its commencement; and it would have
taught me, if I could not even at a very early age teach myself better,
that Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith were really worth nothing." It is a
style that will never be without cultivators, and its frequent
application to Dickens will be shown hereafter. But in speaking of a
book in which some want of all the freshness of his genius first became
apparent, it would be wrong to omit to add that his method of handling a
character is as strongly impressed on the better portions of it as on
the best of his writings. It is difficult to say when a peculiarity
becomes too grotesque, or an extravagance too farcical, to be within the
limits of art, for it is the truth of these as of graver things that
they exist in the world in just the proportions and degree in which
genius can discover them. But no man had ever so surprising a faculty as
Dickens of becoming himself what he was representing; and of entering
into mental phases and processes so absolutely, in conditions of life
the most varied, as to reproduce them completely in dialogue without
need of an explanatory word. (He only departed from this method once,
with a result which will then be pointed out.) In speaking on a former
page of the impression of reality thus to a singular degree conveyed by
him, it was remarked that where characters so revealed themselves the
author's part in them was done; and in the book under notice there is
none, not excepting those least attractive which apparently present only
prominent or salient qualities, in which it will not be found that the
characteristic feature embodied, or the main idea personified, contains
as certainly also some human truth