rles Dickens could not paint a lady or a gentleman." There was no
reason given for this censure. It was presumed that the authors of the
papers meant an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever
defined what an English gentleman or lady was. When one considers that
for a long period an English gentleman's status was determined by the
fact that he owned land, had not even a remote connection with "trade"
or that he was instructed at Eton or Harrow, in Oxford or Cambridge, the
more modern definition would have been very different from what the
English of the olden time would have called a gentleman. Even now, when
a levelling education has rather blurred the surface marks of class in
England, it might be difficult for an American to define what was meant
by this criticism of Dickens. It seems to me that no one could define
exactly what was meant. The convention that makes the poet in
Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon were peopled by
thrushes, or orchestrated by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him
often to borrow words from the English vocabulary of England without
analyzing their exact meaning. There can be no doubt that Don Quixote
was a gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional sense. And,
if he was a gentleman, why are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller
gentlemen? An interesting thesis might be written on the application of
Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam
Weller. Why not?

There is a truth about the English people, at least the lower classes,
which Mr. Chesterton in his illuminating "Appreciations and Criticisms
of the Works of Charles Dickens"--one of his best books--brings out,
though he does not accentuate it sufficiently: this is that the lower
classes of the English are both witty and humorous. Witty because they
are satirical and humorous because they are ironical. Sam Weller
represents a type--a common type--more exactly than Samuel Lover's
"Handy Andy" or any of Charles Lever's Irish characters. When one
examines the foundation for the assertion that Dickens could not draw a
lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies and gentlemen, in the
English sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that all
conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be
a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor
Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say
it, n