solemn, and Toots is invariably idiotic.  It is no doubt natural that Barnaby’s Raven should always want tea, whatever happens, for the poor bird has but a limited vocabulary.  But one does not see why articulate and sane persons like Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and Micawber should repeat the same phrases under every condition and to all persons.  This, no doubt, is the essence of farce:  it may be irresistibly droll as farce, but it does not rise beyond farce.  And at last even the most enthusiastic Pickwickian wearies of such monotony of iteration.

Now, the keynote of caricature being the distortion of nature, it inevitably follows that humourous exaggeration is unnatural, however droll; and, where it is the main source of the drollery, the picture as a whole ceases to be within the bounds of nature.  But the great masters of the human heart invariably remain true to nature:  not merely true to a selected feature, but to the natural form as a whole.  Falstaff, in his wildest humour, speaks and acts as such a man really might speak and act.  He has no catch-phrase on which he harps, as if he were a talking-machine wound up to emit a dozen sounds.  Parson Adams speaks and acts as such a being might do in nature.  The comic characters of Goldsmith, Scott, or Thackeray do not outrun and defy nature, nor does their drollery depend on any special and abnormal feature, much less on any stock phrase which they use as a label.  The illustrations of Cruikshank and Phiz are delightfully droll, and often caricatures of a high order.  But being caricatures, they overload and exaggerate nature, and indeed are always, in one sense, impossible in nature.  The grins, the grimaces, the contortions, the dwarfs, the idiots, the monstrosities of these wonderful sketches could not be found in human beings constructed on any known anatomy.  And Dickens’s own characters have the same element of unnatural distortion.  It is possible that these familiar caricatures have even done harm to his reputation.  His creations are of a higher order of art and are more distinctly spontaneous and original.  But the grotesque sketches with which he almost uniformly presented his books accentuate the element of caricature on which he relied; and often add an unnatural extravagance beyond that extravagance which was the essence of his own method.

The consequence is that everything in Dickens is “in the excess,” as Aristotle would say, and not “in the mean.”  Whether it is Tony Weller, or “the Shepherd,” or the Fat Boy, Hugh or the Raven, Toots or Traddles, Micawber or Skimpole, Gamp or Mantalini—­all are overloaded in the sense that they exceed nature, and are more or less extravagant.  They are wonderful and delightful caricatures, but they are impossible in fact.  The similes are hyperbolic; the names are grotesque; the incidents partake of harlequinade, and the speeches of roaring farce.  It is often wildly droll, but it is rather the drollery of the stage than of the