When we turn from his outward training to his inner disposition we find two strongly marked elements.  The first is his excessive imagination, which made good stories out of incidents that ordinarily pass unnoticed, and which described the commonest things—­a street, a shop, a fog, a lamp-post, a stagecoach—­with a wealth of detail and of romantic suggestion that makes many of his descriptions like lyric poems.  The second element is his extreme sensibility, which finds relief only in laughter and tears.  Like shadow and sunshine these follow one another closely throughout all his books.

Remembering these two things, his training and disposition, we can easily foresee the kind of novel he must produce.  He will be sentimental, especially over children and outcasts; he will excuse the individual in view of the faults of society; he will be dramatic or melodramatic; and his sensibility will keep him always close to the public, studying its tastes and playing with its smiles and tears.  If pleasing the public be in itself an art, then Dickens is one of our greatest artists.  And it is well to remember that in pleasing his public there was nothing of the hypocrite or demagogue in his make-up.  He was essentially a part of the great drifting panoramic crowd that he loved.  His sympathetic soul made all their joys and griefs his own.  He fought against injustice; he championed the weak against the strong; he gave courage to the faint, and hope to the weary in heart; and in the love which the public gave him in return he found his best reward.  Here is the secret of Dickens’s unprecedented popular success, and we may note here a very significant parallel with Shakespeare.  The great different in the genius and work of the two men does not change the fact that each won success largely because he studied and pleased his public.

GENERAL PLAN OF DICKENS’S NOVELS.  An interesting suggestion comes to us from a study of the conditions which led to Dickens’s first three novels. Pickwick was written, at the suggestion of an editor, for serial publication.  Each chapter was to be accompanied by a cartoon by Seymor (a comic artist of the day), and the object was to amuse the public, and, incidentally, to sell the paper.  The result was a series of characters and scenes and incidents which for vigor and boundless fun have never been equaled in our language.  Thereafter, no matter what he wrote, Dickins was lbeled a humorist.  Like a certain American writer of our own generation, everything he said, whether for a feast or a funeral, was spposed to contain a laugh.  In a word, he was the victim of his own book.  Dickens was keen enough to understand his danger, and his next novel, Oliver Twist, had the serious purpose of mitigating the evils under which the poor were suffering.  Its hero was a poor child, the unfortunate victim of society; and, in order to draw attention to the real need, Dickens exaggerated the woeful condition of the poor, and filled his pages