many realistic details, seldom give the impression of reality.  His characters, though we laugh or weep or shudder at them, are sometimes only caricatures, each one an exaggeration of some peculiarity, which suggest Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.  It is Dickens’s art to give his heroes sufficient reality to make them suggest certain types of men and women whom we know; but in reading him we find ourselves often in the mental state of a man who is watching through a microscope the swarming life of a water drop.  Here are lively, bustling, extraordinary creatures, some beautiful, some grotesque, but all far apart from the life that we know in daily experience.  It is certainly not the reality of these characters, but rather the genius of the author in managing them, which interests us and holds our attention.  Notwithstanding this criticism, which we would gladly have omitted, Dickens is excellent reading, and his novels will continue to be popular just so long as men enjoy a wholesome and absorbing story.

WHAT TO READ.  Aside from the reforms in schools and prisons and workhouses which Dickens accomplished, he has laid us all, rich and poor alike, under a debt of gratitude.  After the year 1843 the one literary work which he never neglected was to furnish a Christmas story for his readers; and it is due in some measure to the help of these stories, brimming over with good cheer, that Christmas has become in all English-speaking countries a season of gladness, of gift giving at home, and of remembering those less fortunate than ourselves, who are still members of a common brotherhood.  If we read nothing else of Dickens, once a year, at Christmas time, we should remember him and renew our youth by reading one of his holiday stories,—­ The Cricket on the Hearth, The Chimes, and above all the unrivaled Christmas Carol.  The latter especially will be read and loved as long as men are moved by the spirit of Christmas.

Of the novels, David Copperfield is regarded by many as Dickens’s masterpiece.  It is well to begin with this novel, not simply for the unusual interest of the story, but also for the glimpse it gives us of the author’s own boyhood and family.  For pure fun and hilarity Pickwick will always be a favorite; but for artistic finish, and for the portrayal of one great character, Sydney Carton, nothing else that Dickens wrote is comparable to A Tale of Two Cities.  Here is an absorbing story, with a carefully constructed plot, and the action moves swiftly to its thrilling, inevitable conclusion.  Usually Dickens introduces several pathetic or grotesque or laughable characters besides the main actors, and records various unnecessary dramatic episodes for their own sake; but in A Tale of Two Cities everything has its place in the development of the main story.  There are, as usual, many characters,—­Sydney Carton, the outcast, who lays down his life for the happiness of one whom