g continue to delight
both old and young, learned and unlearned alike, they are most to be
envied who read him when young, and they are most to be pitied who read
him with a critical spirit. May that be far from us, as we take up our
_Pickwick_ and talk over the autobiographic pathos of _David
Copperfield_.

This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in
that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him,
was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some
of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work. Though I
never spoke to him, there were times when I saw him almost daily; I
heard him speak and read in public; and his favourite haunts in London
and the country have been familiar to me from my boyhood. And thus, as
I read again my _Pickwick_, and _Nickleby_, and _Copperfield_, there
come back to me many personal and local memories of my own. The
personality of Charles Dickens was, even to his distant readers, vivid
and intense; and hence it is much more so to those who have known his
person. I am thus an ardent Pickwickian myself; and anything I say
about our immortal Founder must be understood in a Pickwickian sense.

Charles Dickens was before all things a great humourist--doubtless the
greatest of this century; for, though we may find in Scott a more truly
Shakespearean humour of the highest order, the humour of Dickens is so
varied, so paramount, so inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our
memory as the humourist of the age. Swift, Fielding, Hogarth, Sterne,
and Goldsmith, in the last century, reached at times a more enduring
level of humour without caricature; but the gift has been more rarely
imparted to their successors in the age of steam. Now, we shall never
get an adequate definition of that imponderable term--humour--a term
which, perhaps, was invented to be the eternal theme of budding
essayists. We need not be quite as liberal in our interpretation of
humour as was Thackeray in opening his _English Humourists_; for he
declared that its business was to awaken and direct our love, our pity,
our kindness, our scorn for imposture, our tenderness for the weak, to
comment on the actions and passions of life, to be the week-day
preacher--and much more to that effect. But it may serve our immediate
purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is "grotesque imagery";
and "grotesque" is "distorted of figure; unnatural." That is