t, rules
himself and his time-table with a rod of iron. In his letter-writing
alone, Dickens did a life's literary work. Nowadays no one thinks of
writing such letters; that is to say, letters of such length and detail,
for the quality is Dickens's own. He evidently enjoyed this use of the
pen. Page after page of Forster's _Life_ (750 pages in the _Letters_
edited by his daughter and sister-in-law) is occupied with transcription
from private correspondence, and never a line of this but is thoroughly
worthy of print and preservation. If he makes a tour in any part of the
British Isles, he writes a full description of all he sees, of
everything that happens, and writes it with such gusto, such mirth, such
strokes of fine picturing, as appear in no other private letters ever
given to the public. Naturally buoyant in all circumstances, a holiday
gave him the exhilaration of a schoolboy. See how he writes from
Cornwall, when on a trip with two or three friends, in 1843. "Heavens!
if you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their
immense variety of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you
could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the maniac glee
of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old
churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy
seashore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy
heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don't know how
many hundred feet below.... I never laughed in my life as I did on this
journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and
gasping and bursting the buckles off the back of my stock, all the way.
And Stanfield"--the painter--"got into such apoplectic entanglements
that we were obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we
could recover him."

The animation of Dickens's look would attract the attention of any one,
anywhere. His figure was not that of an Adonis, but his brightness made
him the centre and pivot of every society he was in. The keenness and
vivacity of his eye combined with his inordinate appetite for life to
give the unique quality to all that he wrote. His instrument is that of
the direct, sinewy English of Smollett, combined with much of the
humorous grace of Goldsmith (his two favourite authors), but modernized
to a certain extent under the influence of Washington Irving, Sydney
Smith, Jeffrey, Lamb, and other writers of the _Lon