ot been his, much has yet been achieved
by him. Out of his unequalled observation, his satire, and his
sensibility, has proceeded a series of original characters existing
nowhere but in England, which will exhibit to future generations not the
record of his own genius only, but that of his country and his times.

Between the judgment thus passed by the distinguished French lecturer,
and the later comment to be now given from an English critic, certainly
not in arrest of that judgment, may fitly come a passage from one of
Dickens's letters saying something of the limitations placed upon the
artist in England. It may read like a quasi-confession of one of M.
Taine's charges, though it was not written with reference to his own
but to one of Scott's later novels. "Similarly" (15th of August 1856) "I
have always a fine feeling of the honest state into which we have got,
when some smooth gentleman says to me or to some one else when I am by,
how odd it is that the hero of an English book is always
uninteresting--too good--not natural, &c. I am continually hearing this
of Scott from English people here, who pass their lives with Balzac and
Sand. But O my smooth friend, what a shining impostor you must think
yourself and what an ass you must think me, when you suppose that by
putting a brazen face upon it you can blot out of my knowledge the fact
that this same unnatural young gentleman (if to be decent is to be
necessarily unnatural), whom you meet in those other books and in mine,
_must_ be presented to you in that unnatural aspect by reason of your
morality, and is not to have, I will not say any of the indecencies you
like, but not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and
confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men!"

M. Taine's criticism was written three or four years before Dickens's
death, and to the same date belong some notices in England which adopted
more or less the tone of depreciation; conceding the great effects
achieved by the writer, but disputing the quality and value of his art.
For it is incident to all such criticism of Dickens to be of necessity
accompanied by the admission, that no writer has so completely impressed
himself on the time in which he lived, that he has made his characters a
part of literature, and that his readers are the world.

But, a little more than a year after his death, a paper was published
of which the object was to reconcile such seeming inconsiste