description,” and Littimer’s report that “the young woman was partial to the sea.”  This was the polite language of that time, as we conclude when we find it to be the language that Charlotte Bronte shook off; but before she shook it off she used it.  Dickens, too, had something to throw off; in his earlier books there is an inflation—­rounded words fill the inappropriate mouth of Bill Sikes himself—­but he discarded them with a splendid laugh.  They are charged upon Mr. Micawber in his own character as author.  See him as he sits by to hear Captain Hopkins read the petition in the debtors’ prison “from His Most Gracious Majesty’s unfortunate subjects.”  Mr. Micawber listened, we read, “with a little of an author’s vanity, contemplating (not severely) the spikes upon the opposite wall.”  It should be remembered that when Dickens shook himself free of everything that hampered his genius he was not so much beloved or so much applauded as when he gave to his cordial readers matter for facile sentiment and for humour of the second order.  His public were eager to be moved and to laugh, and he gave them Little Nell and Sam Weller; he loved to please them, and it is evident that he pleased himself also.  Mr. Micawber, Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Chick, Mrs. Pipchin, Mr. Augustus Moddle, Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Plornish, are not so famous as Sam Weller and Little Nell, nor is Traddles, whose hair looked as though he had seen a cheerful ghost.

We are told of the delight of the Japanese man in a chance finding of something strange-shaped, an asymmetry that has an accidental felicity, an interest.  If he finds such a grace or disproportion—­whatever the interest may be—­in a stone or a twig that has caught his ambiguous eye at the roadside, he carries it to his home to place it in its irregularly happy place.  Dickens seems to have had a like joy in things misshapen or strangely shapen, uncommon or grotesque.  He saddled even his heroes—­those heroes are, perhaps, his worst work, young men at once conventional and improbable—­with whimsically ugly names; while his invented names are whimsically perfect:  that of Vholes for the predatory silent man in black, and that of Tope for the cathedral verger.  A suggestion of dark and vague flight in Vholes; something of old floors, something respectably furtive and musty, in Tope.  In Dickens, the love of lurking, unusual things, human and inanimate—­he wrote of his discoveries delightedly in his letters—­was hypertrophied; and it has its part in the simplest and the most fantastic of his humours, especially those that are due to his child-like eyesight; let us read, for example, of the rooks that seemed to attend upon Dr. Strong (late of Canterbury) in his Highgate garden, “as if they had been written to about him by the Canterbury rooks and were observing him closely in consequence”; and of Master Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice—­“On looking at Master Micawber again I saw that he had