ters are quite subordinate to this main
fact that the man who wrote them is thus perfectly seen in them. But
they do not lessen the estimate of his genius. Admiration rises higher
at the writer's mental forces, who, putting so much of himself into his
work for the public, had still so much overflowing for such private
intercourse. The sunny health of nature in them is manifest; its
largeness, spontaneity, and manliness; but they have also that which
highest intellects appreciate best. "I have read them," Lord Russell
wrote to me, "with delight and pain. His heart, his imagination, his
qualities of painting what is noble, and finding diamonds hidden far
away, are greater here than even his works convey to me. How I lament he
was not spared to us longer. I shall have a fresh grief when he dies in
your volumes." Shallower people are more apt to find other things. If
the bonhommie of a man's genius is obvious to all the world, there are
plenty of knowing ones ready to take the shine out of the genius, to
discover that after all it is not so wonderful, that what is grave in it
wants depth, and the humour has something mechanical. But it will be
difficult even for these to look over letters so marvellous in the art
of reproducing to the sight what has once been seen, so natural and
unstudied in their wit and fun, and with such a constant well-spring of
sprightly runnings of speech in them, point of epigram, ingenuity of
quaint expression, absolute freedom from every touch of affectation, and
to believe that the source of this man's humour, or of whatever gave
wealth to his genius, was other than habitual, unbounded, and
resistless.

There is another consideration of some importance. Sterne did not more
incessantly fall back from his works upon himself than Dickens did, and
undoubtedly one of the impressions left by the letters is that of the
intensity and tenacity with which he recognized, realized, contemplated,
cultivated, and thoroughly enjoyed, his own individuality in even its
most trivial manifestations. But if any one is led to ascribe this to
self-esteem, to a narrow exclusiveness, or to any other invidious form
of egotism, let him correct the impression by observing how Dickens bore
himself amid the universal blazing-up of America, at the beginning and
at the end of his career. Of his hearty, undisguised, and unmistakeable
enjoyment of his astonishing and indeed quite bewildering popularity,
there can be as little do