book.  The characters are never possible in fact; they are not, and are not meant to be, nature; they are always and everywhere comic distortions of nature.  Goldsmith’s Dr. Primrose tells us that he chose his wife for the same qualities for which she chose her wedding gown.  That is humour, but it is also pure, literal, exact truth to nature.  David Copperfield’s little wife is called a lap-dog, acts like a lap-dog, and dies like a lap-dog; the lap-dog simile is so much overdone that we are glad to get rid of her, and instead of weeping with Copperfield, we feel disposed to call him a ninny.

Nothing is more wonderful in Dickens than his exuberance of animal spirits, that inexhaustible fountain of life and gaiety, in which he equals Scott and far surpasses any other modern.  The intensity of the man, his electric activity, his spasmodic nervous power, quite dazzle and stun us.  But this restless gaiety too often grows fatiguing, as the rollicking fun begins to pall upon us, as the jokes ring hollow, and the wit gets stale by incessant reiteration.  We know how much in real life we get to hate the joker who does not know when to stop, who repeats his jests, and forces the laugh when it does not flow freely.  Something of the kind the most devoted of Dickens’s readers feel when they take in too much at one time.  None but the very greatest can maintain for long one incessant outpour of drollery, much less of extravagance.  Aristophanes could do it; Shakespeare could do it; so could Cervantes; and so, too, Rabelais.  But then, the wildest extravagance of these men is so rich, so varied, so charged with insight and thought, and, in the case of Rabelais, so resplendent with learning and suggestion, that we never feel satiety and the cruel sense that the painted mask on the stage is grinning at us, whilst the actor behind it is weary and sad.  When one who is not amongst the very greatest pours forth the same inextinguishable laughter in the same key, repeating the same tricks, and multiplying kindred oddities, people of cultivation enjoy it heartily once, twice, it may be a dozen times, but at last they make way for the young bloods who can go thirty-seven times to see “Charley’s Aunt.”

A good deal has been said about Dickens’s want of reading; and his enthusiastic biographer very fairly answers that Charles Dickens’s book was the great book of life, of which he was an indefatigable student.  When other men were at school and at college, he was gathering up a vast experience of the hard world, and when his brother writers were poring over big volumes in their libraries, he was pacing up and down London and its suburbs with inexhaustible energy, drinking in oddities, idiosyncrasies, and wayside incidents at every pore.  It is quite true:  London is a microcosm, an endless and bottomless Babylon; which, perhaps, no man has ever known so well as did Charles Dickens.  This was his library:  here he gathered that vast encyclopaedia of human