t belong of necessity to pictures, even the most exquisite,
of mere character or manners; the property which in its highest aspects
Carlyle so subtly described as a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting
into our affections what is below us as the other draws down into our
affections what is above us. But it has a danger which Dickens also
hints at, and into which he often fell. All humour has in it, is indeed
identical with, what ordinary people are apt to call exaggeration; but
there is an excess beyond the allowable even here, and to "pet" or
magnify out of proper bounds its sense of what is droll, is to put the
merely grotesque in its place. What might have been overlooked in a
writer with no uncommon powers of invention, was thrown into
overpowering prominence by Dickens's wealth of fancy; and a splendid
excess of his genius came to be objected to as its integral and
essential quality.

It cannot be said to have had any place in his earlier books. His
powers were not at their highest and the humour was less fine and
subtle, but there was no such objection to be taken. No misgiving
interrupted the enjoyment of the wonderful freshness of animal spirits
in _Pickwick_; but beneath its fun, laughter, and light-heartedness were
indications of power of the first rank in the delineation of character.
Some caricature was in the plan; but as the circle of people widened
beyond the cockney club, and the delightful oddity of Mr. Pickwick took
more of an independent existence, a different method revealed itself,
nothing appeared beyond the exaggerations permissible to humorous
comedy, and the art was seen which can combine traits vividly true to
particular men or women with propensities common to all mankind. This
has its highest expression in Fielding: but even the first of Dickens's
books showed the same kind of mastery; and, by the side of its life-like
middle-class people universally familiar, there was one figure before
seen by none but at once knowable by all, delightful for the surprise it
gave by its singularity and the pleasure it gave by its truth; and,
though short of the highest in this form of art, taking rank with the
class in which live everlastingly the dozen unique inventions that have
immortalized the English novel. The groups in _Oliver Twist_, Fagin and
his pupils, Sikes and Nancy, Mr. Bumble and his parish-boy, belong to
the same period; when Dickens also began those pathetic delineations
that opened to the ne