original, the most inexhaustible, the most wonderful, of modern humorists.  Creations such as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller, Sairy Gamp, take rank with Falstaff and Dogberry; while many others, like Dick Swiveller, Stiggins, Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills, are almost equally good.  In the innumerable swarm of minor characters with which he has enriched our comic literature there is no indistinctness.  Indeed, the objection that has been made to him is that his characters are too distinct—­that he puts labels on them; that they are often mere personifications of a single trick of speech or manner, which becomes tedious and unnatural by repetition.  Thus, Grandfather Smallweed is always settling down into his cushion, and having to be shaken up; Mr. Jellyby is always sitting with his head against the wall; Peggotty is always bursting her buttons off, etc.  As Dickens’s humorous characters tend perpetually to run into caricatures and grotesques, so his sentiment, from the same excess, slops over too frequently into “gush,” and into a too deliberate and protracted attack upon the pity.  A favorite humorous device in his style is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident, as where, for example, Mr. Roker “muttered certain unpleasant invocations concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;” or where the drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr. Smangle “a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that his audience were not musically disposed.”  This manner was original with Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock heroic language of Jonathan Wild; but as practiced by a thousand imitators, ever since, it has gradually become a burden.

It would not be the whole truth to say that the difference between the humor of Thackeray and Dickens is the same as between that of Shakspere and Ben Jonson.  Yet it is true that the “humors” of Ben Jonson have an analogy with the extremer instances of Dickens’s character sketches in this respect, namely, that they are both studies of the eccentric, the abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the typical and universal; studies of manners, rather than of whole characters.  And it is easily conceivable that, at no distant day, the oddities of Captain Cuttle, Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and Newman Noggs will seem as far-fetched and impossible as those of Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk and Sir Amorous La-Foole.

When Dickens was looking about for some one to take Seymour’s place as illustrator of Pickwick, Thackeray applied for the job, but without success.  He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating between art and literature.  He had begun to draw caricatures with his pencil when a school-boy at the Charter House, and to scribble them with his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing The Snob, a weekly under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize