ousand such
exhilarating little sights in his memory of these pages. From the gently
grotesque to the fantastic run Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in Quilp and
Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and a
spontaneous combustion was an accident much to his mind.

Dickens wrote for a world that either was exceedingly excitable and
sentimental, or had the convention or tradition of great sentimental
excitability. All his people, suddenly surprised, lose their presence of
mind. Even when the surprise is not extraordinary their actions are
wild. When Tom Pinch calls upon John Westlock in London, after no very
long separation, John, welcoming him at breakfast, puts the rolls into
his boots, and so forth. And this kind of distraction comes upon men and
women everywhere in his books--distractions of laughter as well. All
this seems artificial to-day, whereas Dickens in his best moments is the
simplest, as he is the most vigilant, of men. But his public was as
present to him as an actor's audience is to the actor, and I cannot think
that this immediate response was good for his art. Assuredly he is not
solitary. We should not wish him to be solitary as a poet is, but we may
wish that now and again, even while standing applauded and acclaimed, he
had appraised the applause more coolly and more justly, and within his
inner mind.

Those critics who find what they call vulgarisms think they may safely go
on to accuse Dickens of bad grammar. The truth is that his grammar is
not only good but strong; it is far better in construction than
Thackeray's, the ease of whose phrase sometimes exceeds and is slack.
Lately, during the recent centenary time, a writer averred that Dickens
"might not always be parsed," but that we loved him for his, etc., etc.
Dickens's page is to be parsed as strictly as any man's. It is, apart
from the matter of grammar, a wonderful thing that he, with his little
education, should have so excellent a diction. In a letter that records
his reluctance to work during a holiday, the word "wave" seems to me
perfect: "Imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk." In his
exquisite use of the word "establishment" in the following phrase, we
find his own perfect sense of the use of words in his own day; but in the
second quotation given there is a most beautiful sign of education.
"Under the weight of my wicked secret" (the little boy Pip had succoured
his convict with his brother-in-