nature, which some are inclined to call “cockney,” but if it be, “Cockayne” must be a very large country indeed.  Still, the fact remains, that of book-learning of any kind Dickens remained, to the end of his days, perhaps more utterly innocent than any other famous English writer since Shakespeare.  His biographer labours to prove that he had read Fielding and Smollett, Don Quixote and Gil Blas, The Spectator, and Robinson Crusoe.  Perhaps he had, like most men who have learned to read.  But, no doubt, this utter severance from books, which we feel in his tales, will ultimately tell against their immortality.

This rigid abstinence from books, which Dickens practised on system, had another reaction that we notice in his style.  Not only do we feel in reading his novels that we have no reason to assume that he had ever read anything except a few popular romances, but we note that he can hardly be said to have a formed literary style of his own.  Dickens had mannerisms, but hardly a style.  In some ways, this is a good thing:  much less can he be said to have a bad style.  It is simply no style.  He knows nothing of the crisp, modulated, balanced, and reserved mastery of phrase and sentence which marks Thackeray.  Nor is it the easy simplicity of Robinson Crusoe and the Vicar of Wakefield.  The tale spins along, and the incidents rattle on with the volubility of a good story-teller who warms up as he goes, but who never stops to think of his sentences and phrases.  He often gets verbose, rings the changes on a point which he sees to have caught his hearers; he plays with a fancy out of measure, and turns his jest inside out and over and over, like a fine comic actor when the house is in a roar.  His language is free, perfectly clear, often redundant, sometimes grandiloquent, and usually addressed more to the pit than to the boxes.  And he is a little prone to slide, even in his own proper person, into those formal courtesies and obsolete compliments which forty years ago survived amongst the superior orders of bagmen and managing clerks.

There is an old topic of discussion whether Dickens could invent an organic and powerful plot, and carry out an elaborate scheme with perfect skill.  It is certain that he has never done so, and it can hardly be said that he has ever essayed it.  The serial form in parts, wherein almost all his stories were cast, requiring each number of three chapters to be “assorted,” like sugar-plums, with grave and gay, so as to tell just enough but not too much, made a highly-wrought scheme almost impossible.  It is plain that Charles Dickens had nothing of that epical gift which gave us Tom Jones and Ivanhoe.  Perhaps the persistent use of the serial form shows that he felt no interest in that supreme art of an immense drama duly unfolded to a prepared end.  In Pickwick there neither was, nor could there be, any organic plot.  In Oliver Twist,