hat was
wrong, that he held no abuse to be unimprovable, that he left none of
the evils named exactly as he found them, and that to influences drawn
from his writings were due not a few of the salutary changes which
marked the age in which he lived; but anger does not improve satire, and
it gave latterly, from the causes named, too aggressive a form to what,
after all, was but a very wholesome hatred of the cant that everything
English is perfect, and that to call a thing _un_English is to doom it
to abhorred extinction.

"I have got an idea for occasional papers in _Household Words_ called
the Member for Nowhere. They will contain an account of his views,
votes, and speeches; and I think of starting with his speeches on the
Sunday question. He is a member of the Government of course. The moment
they found such a member in the House, they felt that he must be dragged
(by force, if necessary) into the Cabinet." "I give it up reluctantly,"
he wrote afterwards, "and with it my hope to have made every man in
England feel something of the contempt for the House of Commons that I
have. We shall never begin to do anything until the sentiment is
universal." That was in August 1854; and the break-down in the Crimea
that winter much embittered his radicalism. "I am hourly strengthened in
my old belief," he wrote (3rd of February 1855) "that our political
aristocracy and our tuft-hunting are the death of England. In all this
business I don't see a gleam of hope. As to the popular spirit, it has
come to be so entirely separated from the Parliament and Government, and
so perfectly apathetic about them both, that I seriously think it a most
portentous sign." A couple of months later: "I have rather a bright
idea, I think, for _Household Words_ this morning: a fine little bit of
satire: an account of an Arabic MS. lately discovered very like the
_Arabian Nights_--called the Thousand and One Humbugs. With new versions
of the best known stories." This also had to be given up, and is only
mentioned as another illustration of his political discontents and of
their connection with his journal-work. The influences from his early
life which unconsciously strengthened them in certain social directions
has been hinted at, and of his absolute sincerity in the matter there
can be no doubt. The mistakes of Dickens were never such as to cast a
shade on his integrity. What he said with too much bitterness, in his
heart he believed; and had, alas! t