hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a
child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very
funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn
too--and which indeed, as you remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic
conception that first encouraged me. To be quite sure I had fallen into
no unconscious repetitions, I read _David Copperfield_ again the other
day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe."

It may be doubted if Dickens could better have established his right to
the front rank among novelists claimed for him, than by the ease and
mastery with which, in these two books of _Copperfield_ and _Great
Expectations_, he kept perfectly distinct the two stories of a boy's
childhood, both told in the form of autobiography. A subtle penetration
into character marks the unlikeness in the likeness; there is enough at
once of resemblance and of difference in the position and surroundings
of each to account for the divergences of character that arise; both
children are good-hearted, and both have the advantage of association
with models of tender simplicity and oddity, perfect in their truth and
quite distinct from each other; but a sudden tumble into distress
steadies Peggotty's little friend, and as unexpected a stroke of good
fortune turns the head of the small protege of Joe Gargery. What a deal
of spoiling nevertheless, a nature that is really good at the bottom of
it will stand without permanent damage, is nicely shown in Pip; and the
way he reconciles his determination to act very shabbily to his early
friends, with a conceited notion that he is setting them a moral
example, is part of the shading of a character drawn with extraordinary
skill. His greatest trial comes out of his good luck; and the
foundations of both are laid at the opening of the tale, in a churchyard
down by the Thames, as it winds past desolate marshes twenty miles to
the sea, of which a masterly picture in half a dozen lines will give
only average example of the descriptive writing that is everywhere one
of the charms of the book. It is strange, as I transcribe the words,
with what wonderful vividness they bring back the very spot on which we
stood when he said he meant to make it the scene of the opening of his
story--Cooling Castle ruins and the desolate Church, lying out among the
marshes seven miles from Gadshill! "My first most vivid and broad
impression . . . on a