sorrowful period of 1857-8, when, for reasons
which I have not thought myself free to suppress, a vaguely disturbed
feeling for the time took possession of him, and occurrences led to his
adoption of other pursuits than those to which till then he had given
himself exclusively. It was a sad interval in his life; but, though
changes incident to the new occupation then taken up remained, and with
them many adverse influences which brought his life prematurely to a
close, it was, with any reference to that feeling, an interval only; and
the dominant impression of the later years, as of the earlier, takes the
marvellously domestic home-loving shape in which also the strength of
his genius is found. It will not do to draw round any part of such a man
too hard a line, and the writer must not be charged with inconsistency
who says that Dickens's childish sufferings,[302] and the sense they
burnt into him of the misery of loneliness and a craving for joys of
home, though they led to what was weakest in him, led also to what was
greatest. It was his defect as well as his merit in maturer life not to
be able to live alone. When the fancies of his novels were upon him and
he was under their restless influence, though he often talked of
shutting himself up in out of the way solitary places, he never went
anywhere unaccompanied by members of his family. His habits of daily
life he carried with him wherever he went. In Albaro and Genoa, at
Lausanne and Geneva, in Paris and Boulogne, his ways were as entirely
those of home as in London and Broadstairs. If it is the property of a
domestic nature to be personally interested in every detail, the
smallest as the greatest, of the four walls within which one lives, then
no man had it so essentially as Dickens. No man was so inclined
naturally to derive his happiness from home concerns. Even the kind of
interest in a house which is commonly confined to women, he was full of.
Not to speak of changes of importance, there was not an additional hook
put up wherever he inhabited, without his knowledge, or otherwise than
as part of some small ingenuity of his own. Nothing was too minute for
his personal superintendence. Whatever might be in hand, theatricals for
the little children, entertainments for those of larger growth, cricket
matches, dinners, field sports, from the first new year's eve dance in
Doughty Street to the last musical party in Hyde Park Place, he was the
centre and soul of it. He