cter in half a dozen
words.

Of the other portions of the book that had a strong personal interest
for him I have spoken on a former page, and I will now only add an
allusion of his own. "There are some things in Flora in number seven
that seem to me to be extraordinarily droll, with something serious at
the bottom of them after all. Ah, well! was there _not_ something very
serious in it once? I am glad to think of being in the country with the
long summer mornings as I approach number ten, where I have finally
resolved to make Dorrit rich. It should be a very fine point in the
story. . . . Nothing in Flora made me laugh so much as the confusion of
ideas between gout flying upwards, and its soaring with Mr. F---- to
another sphere." He had himself no inconsiderable enjoyment also of Mr.
F.'s aunt; and in the old rascal of a patriarch, the smooth-surfaced
Casby, and other surroundings of poor Flora, there was fun enough to
float an argosy of second-rates, assuming such to have formed the staple
of the tale. It would be far from fair to say they did. The defect in
the book was less the absence of excellent character or keen
observation, than the want of ease and coherence among the figures of
the story, and of a central interest in the plan of it. The agencies
that bring about its catastrophe, too, are less agreeable even than in
_Bleak House_; and, most unlike that well-constructed story, some of the
most deeply considered things that occur in it have really little to do
with the tale itself. The surface-painting of both Miss Wade and
Tattycoram, to take an instance, is anything but attractive, yet there
is under it a rare force of likeness in the unlikeness between the two
which has much subtlety of intention; and they must both have had, as
well as Mr. Gowan himself, a striking effect in the novel, if they had
been made to contribute in a more essential way to its interest or
development. The failure nevertheless had not been for want of care and
study, as well of his own design as of models by masters in his art. A
happier hint of apology, for example, could hardly be given for
Fielding's introduction of such an episode as the Man of the Hill
between the youth and manhood of Blifil and Tom Jones, than is suggested
by what Dickens wrote of the least interesting part of _Little Dorrit_.
In the mere form, Fielding of course was only following the lead of
Cervantes and Le Sage; but Dickens rightly judged his purpose also