Copperfield's little wife is called a lap-dog, acts like
a lap-dog, and dies like a lap-dog; the lap-dog simile is so much
overdone that we are glad to get rid of her, and instead of weeping
with Copperfield, we feel disposed to call him a ninny.

Nothing is more wonderful in Dickens than his exuberance of animal
spirits, that inexhaustible fountain of life and gaiety, in which he
equals Scott and far surpasses any other modern. The intensity of the
man, his electric activity, his spasmodic nervous power, quite dazzle
and stun us. But this restless gaiety too often grows fatiguing, as
the rollicking fun begins to pall upon us, as the jokes ring hollow,
and the wit gets stale by incessant reiteration. We know how much in
real life we get to hate the joker who does not know when to stop, who
repeats his jests, and forces the laugh when it does not flow freely.
Something of the kind the most devoted of Dickens's readers feel when
they take in too much at one time. None but the very greatest can
maintain for long one incessant outpour of drollery, much less of
extravagance. Aristophanes could do it; Shakespeare could do it; so
could Cervantes; and so, too, Rabelais. But then, the wildest
extravagance of these men is so rich, so varied, so charged with
insight and thought, and, in the case of Rabelais, so resplendent with
learning and suggestion, that we never feel satiety and the cruel sense
that the painted mask on the stage is grinning at us, whilst the actor
behind it is weary and sad. When one who is not amongst the very
greatest pours forth the same inextinguishable laughter in the same
key, repeating the same tricks, and multiplying kindred oddities,
people of cultivation enjoy it heartily once, twice, it may be a dozen
times, but at last they make way for the young bloods who can go
thirty-seven times to see "Charley's Aunt."

A good deal has been said about Dickens's want of reading; and his
enthusiastic biographer very fairly answers that Charles Dickens's book
was the great book of life, of which he was an indefatigable student.
When other men were at school and at college, he was gathering up a
vast experience of the hard world, and when his brother writers were
poring over big volumes in their libraries, he was pacing up and down
London and its suburbs with inexhaustible energy, drinking in oddities,
idiosyncrasies, and wayside incidents at every pore. It is quite true:
London is a microcosm, an endless