a certain expression of face as if his voice were behind his eyebrows”; and of Joe in his Sunday clothes, “a scarecrow in good circumstances”; and of the cook’s cousin in the Life Guards, with such long legs that “he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else”; and of Mrs. Markleham, “who stared more like a figure-head intended for a ship to be called the Astonishment, than anything else I can think of.”  But there is no reader who has not a thousand such exhilarating little sights in his memory of these pages.  From the gently grotesque to the fantastic run Dickens’s enchanted eyes, and in Quilp and Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and a spontaneous combustion was an accident much to his mind.

Dickens wrote for a world that either was exceedingly excitable and sentimental, or had the convention or tradition of great sentimental excitability.  All his people, suddenly surprised, lose their presence of mind.  Even when the surprise is not extraordinary their actions are wild.  When Tom Pinch calls upon John Westlock in London, after no very long separation, John, welcoming him at breakfast, puts the rolls into his boots, and so forth.  And this kind of distraction comes upon men and women everywhere in his books—­distractions of laughter as well.  All this seems artificial to-day, whereas Dickens in his best moments is the simplest, as he is the most vigilant, of men.  But his public was as present to him as an actor’s audience is to the actor, and I cannot think that this immediate response was good for his art.  Assuredly he is not solitary.  We should not wish him to be solitary as a poet is, but we may wish that now and again, even while standing applauded and acclaimed, he had appraised the applause more coolly and more justly, and within his inner mind.

Those critics who find what they call vulgarisms think they may safely go on to accuse Dickens of bad grammar.  The truth is that his grammar is not only good but strong; it is far better in construction than Thackeray’s, the ease of whose phrase sometimes exceeds and is slack.  Lately, during the recent centenary time, a writer averred that Dickens “might not always be parsed,” but that we loved him for his, etc., etc.  Dickens’s page is to be parsed as strictly as any man’s.  It is, apart from the matter of grammar, a wonderful thing that he, with his little education, should have so excellent a diction.  In a letter that records his reluctance to work during a holiday, the word “wave” seems to me perfect:  “Imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk.”  In his exquisite use of the word “establishment” in the following phrase, we find his own perfect sense of the use of words in his own day; but in the second quotation given there is a most beautiful sign of education.  “Under the weight of my wicked secret” (the little boy Pip had succoured his convict with his brother-in-law’s provisions) “I pondered