uld have been indolently
content to remain a warehouse drudge, would have listlessly fallen
into his father's ways about money, would have had no ambition beyond
his desk and salary as a lawyer's clerk, would have never cared to
piece together and supplement the scattered scraps of his education,
would have rested on his oars when he had once shot into the waters of
ordinary journalism. With Dickens it was not so. The alchemy of a fine
nature had transmuted his disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons
of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, were energy,
self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the
battles of life, in all honour and rectitude, so as to win. From the
muddle of his father's affairs he had taken away a lesson of method,
order, and punctuality in business and other arrangements. "What is
worth doing at all is worth doing well," was not only one of his
favourite maxims--it was the rule of his life.

And for what was to be his life work, what better preparation could
there have been than that which he received? I am far from
recommending warehouses, squalid solitary lodgings, pawnshops,
debtors' prisons,--if such could now be found,--ill-conducted private
schools,--which probably could be found,--attorneys' offices, and the
hand-to-mouth of journalism, as constituting generally the highest
ideal of a liberal education. I am equally far from asserting that the
majority of men do not require more training of a purely scholastic
kind than fell to Dickens' lot. But Dickens was not a bookish man. His
genius did not lie in that direction. To have forced him unduly into
the world of books would have made him, doubtless, an average scholar,
but might have weakened his hold on life. Such a risk was certainly
not worth the running. Fate arranged it otherwise. What he was above
all was a student of the world of men, a passionately keen observer of
the ways of humanity. Men were to be his books, his special branch of
knowledge; and in order to graduate and take high honours in that
school, I repeat, he could have had no better training. Not only had
he passed through a range of most unwonted experiences, experiences
calculated to quicken to the uttermost his superb faculties of
observation and insight; but he had been placed in sympathetic
communication with a strange assortment of characters, lying quite out
of the usual ken of the literary classes. Knowledge and sympathy, the
seeing