ing--to me at all events--so extraordinarily
droll, that though I have been reading it some hundred times in the
course of the working, I have never been able to look at it with the
least composure, but have always roared in the most unblushing manner. I
leave you to find out what it was." It was the encounter of the major
and the tax-collector in the second Mrs. Lirriper. Writing previously of
the papers in _Household Words_ called The Lazy Tour of Two Idle
Apprentices, after saying that he and Mr. Wilkie Collins had written
together a story in the second part, "in which I think you would find it
very difficult to say where I leave off and he comes in," he had said of
the preceding descriptions: "Some of my own tickle me very much; but
that may be in great part because I know the originals, and delight in
their fantastic fidelity." "I have been at work with such a will" he
writes later of a piece of humour for the holidays, "that I have done
the opening and conclusion of the Christmas number. They are done in the
character of a waiter, and I think are exceedingly droll. The thread on
which the stories are to hang, is spun by this waiter, and is,
purposely, very slight; but has, I fancy, a ridiculously comical and
unexpected end. The waiter's account of himself includes (I hope)
everything you know about waiters, presented humorously." In this last
we have a hint of the "fantastic fidelity" with which, when a fancy
"tickled" him, he would bring out what Corporal Nym calls the humour of
it under so astonishing a variety of conceivable and inconceivable
aspects of subtle exaggeration, that nothing was left to the subject but
that special individual illustration of it. In this, however, humour was
not his servant but his master; because it reproduced too readily, and
carried too far, the grotesque imaginings to which great humourists are
prone; which lie indeed deep in their nature; and from which they derive
their genial sympathy with eccentric characters that enables them to
find motives for what to other men is hopelessly obscure, to exalt into
types of humanity what the world turns impatiently aside at, and to
enshrine in a form for eternal homage and love such whimsical absurdity
as Captain Toby Shandy's. But Dickens was too conscious of these
excesses from time to time, not zealously to endeavour to keep the
leading characters in his more important stories under some strictness
of discipline. To confine exaggeration wi