ns, one of his greatest
achievements. Even so brief a retrospect of the six opening years of
Dickens's literary labour will help to a clearer judgment of the work of
the twenty-eight more years that remained to him.

To the special observations already made on the series of stories which
followed the return from America, _Chuzzlewit_, _Dombey_, _Copperfield_,
and _Bleak House_, in which attention has been directed to the higher
purpose and more imaginative treatment that distinguished them,[264] a
general remark is to be added. Though the range of character they
traverse is not wide, it is surrounded by a fertility of invention and
illustration without example in any previous novelist; and it is
represented in these books, so to speak, by a number and variety of
existences sufficiently real to have taken places as among the actual
people of the world. Could half as many known and universally
recognisable men and women be selected out of one story, by any other
prose writer of the first rank, as at once rise to the mind from one of
the masterpieces of Dickens? So difficult of dispute is this, that as
much perhaps will be admitted; but then it will be added, if the reply
is by a critic of the school burlesqued by Mr. Lewes, that after all
they are not individual or special men and women so much as general
impersonations of men and women, abstract types made up of telling
catchwords or surface traits, though with such accumulation upon them of
a wonderful wealth of humorous illustration, itself filled with minute
and accurate knowledge of life, that the real nakedness of the land of
character is hidden. Well, what can be rejoined to this, but that the
poverty or richness of any territory worth survey will for the most part
lie in the kind of observation brought to it. There was no finer
observer than Johnson of the manners of his time, and he protested of
their greatest delineator that he knew only the shell of life. Another
of his remarks, after a fashion followed by the criticizers of Dickens,
places Fielding below one of his famous contemporaries; but who will not
now be eager to reverse such a comparison, as that Fielding tells you
correctly enough what o'clock it is by looking at the face of the dial,
but that Richardson shows you how the watch is made? There never was a
subtler or a more sagacious observer than Fielding, or who better
deserved what is generously said of him by Smollett, that he painted the
characters