make every story he ever wrote throb with
genuine human feeling, he stands in a class by himself.

Many literary critics have spent much labor in comparing Dickens with
Thackeray, but there seems to me no basis for such comparison. One was
a great caricaturist who wrote for the common people and brought tears
or laughter at will from the kitchen maid as freely as from the
great lady; from the little child with no knowledge of the world as
readily as from the mature reader who has known wrong, sorrow and
suffering. The other was the supreme literary artist of modern times,
a gentleman by instinct and training, who wrote for a limited class of
readers, and who could not, because of nature and temperament, touch
at will the springs of laughter and tears as Dickens did. Dickens has
created a score of characters that are household words to one that
Thackeray has given us.

[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-SEVEN--FROM
THE PORTRAIT BY DANIEL MACLISE, R.A.]

Both were men of the rarest genius, English to the core, but each
expressed his genius in his own way, and the way of Dickens touched a
thousand hearts where Thackeray touched but one. Personally, Thackeray
appeals to me far more than Dickens does, but it is foolish to permit
one's own fancies to blind or warp his critical judgments. Hence I set
Dickens at the head of modern novelists and give him an equal place
with Scott as the greatest English writer since Shakespeare.

Take it all in all, Dickens had a successful and a happy life. He was
born in 1812 and died in 1870. His boyhood was hard because of his
father's thriftlessness, and it always rankled in his memory that at
nine years of age he was placed at work pasting labels on boxes of
shoe blacking. But he had many chances in childhood and youth for
reading and study, and his keen mind took advantage of all these. He
was a natural mimic, and it was mere blind chance that kept him from
the stage and made him a great novelist. He drifted into newspaper
work as a shorthand reporter, wrote the stories that are known as
_Sketches by Boz_, and in this way came to be engaged to write the
_Pickwick Papers_, to serve as a story to accompany drawings by
Seymour, a popular artist. But Dickens from the outset planned the
story and Seymour lived only to illustrate the first number.

The tale caught the fancy of the public, and Dickens developed
Pickwick, the Wellers and other characters in a most amusin