most important as well as richest
elements. A man without the perception of humour taking English prose
literature in hand, can of course set about it only in one way.
Accordingly, in Mr. Taine's decisive judgments of our last great
humourist, which proceed upon a principle of psychological analysis
which it is only fair to say he applies impartially to everybody,
_Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, and _The Old Curiosity Shop_ are not in any
manner even named or alluded to; Mrs. Gamp is only once mentioned as
always talking of Mrs. Harris; and Mr. Micawber also only once as using
always the same emphatic phrases; the largest extracts are taken from
the two books in all the Dickens series that are weakest on the humorous
side, _Hard Times_ and the _Chimes_; _Nickleby_, with its many
laughter-moving figures, is dismissed in a line and a half; Mr. Toots,
Captain Cuttle, Susan Nipper, Toodles, and the rest have no place in
what is said of _Dombey_; and, to close with what has caused and must
excuse my digression, Mr. Augustus Moddle is introduced as a gloomy
maniac who makes us laugh and makes us shudder, and as drawn so truly
for a madman that though at first sight agreeable, he is in reality
horrible![76]

A month before the letter subscribed by Dickens in the character, so
happily unknown to himself, of this gloomy maniac, he had written to me
from amidst his famous chapter in which the tables are turned on
Pecksniff; but here I quote the letter chiefly for noticeable words at
its close. "I heard from Macready by the Hibernia. I have been slaving
away regularly, but the weather is against rapid progress. I altered the
verbal error, and substituted for the action you didn't like some words
expressive of the hurry of the scene. Macready sums up slavery in New
Orleans in the way of a gentle doubting on the subject, by a 'but' and a
dash. I believe it is in New Orleans that the man is lying under
sentence of death, who, not having the fear of God before his eyes, did
not deliver up a captive slave to the torture? The largest gun in that
country has not burst yet--_but it will_. Heaven help us, too, from
explosions nearer home! I declare I never go into what is called
'society' that I am not aweary of it, despise it, hate it, and reject
it. The more I see of its extraordinary conceit, and its stupendous
ignorance of what is passing out of doors, the more certain I am that it
is approaching the period when, being incapable of reformi