h wilful legs so little under
control, and yet to the core of him a gentleman; and the apoplectic
Major Bagstock, the Joey B. who claimed to be "rough and tough and
devilish sly;" and Susan Nipper, as swift of tongue as a rapier, and
as sharp? Reader, don't you know all these people? For myself, I have
jostled against them constantly any time the last twenty years. They
are as much part of my life as the people I meet every day.

But there is one person whom I have left out of my enumeration, not
certainly because I don't know him, for I know him very well, but
because I want to speak about him more particularly. That person is my
old friend, Mr. Toots; and the special point in his character which
induces me to linger is the slight touch of craziness that sits so
charmingly upon him. M. Taine, the French critic, in his chapters on
Dickens, repeats the old remark that genius and madness are near
akin.[20] He observes, and observes truly, that Dickens describes so
well because an imagination of singular intensity enables him to _see_
the object presented, and at the same time to impart to it a kind of
visionary life. "That imagination," says M. Taine, "is akin to the
imagination of the monomaniac." And, starting from this point, he
proceeds to show, here again quite truly, with what admirable
sympathetic power and insight Dickens has described certain cases of
madness, as in Mr. Dick. But here, having said some right things, M.
Taine goes all wrong. According to him, these portraits of persons who
have lost their wits, "however amusing they may seem at first sight,"
are "horrible." They could only have been painted by "an imagination
such as that of Dickens, excessive, disordered, and capable of
hallucination." He seems to be not far from thinking that only our
splenetic and melancholy race could have given birth to such literary
monsters. To speak like this, as I conceive, shows a singular
misconception of the instinct or set purpose that led Dickens to
introduce these characters into his novels at all. It is perfectly
true that he has done so several times. Barnaby Rudge, the hero of the
book of the same name, is half-witted. Mr. Dick, in "David
Copperfield," is decidedly crazy. Mr. Toots is at least simple. Little
Miss Flite, in "Bleak House," haunting the Law Courts in expectation
of a judgment on the Day of Judgment, is certainly not _compos
mentis_. And one may concede to M. Taine that some element of sadness
must