say “’Pon my soul this is too ridiculous!  This passes all bounds!” and bursting out afresh as though the sense of the ridiculous overwhelmed him like a tide, which carried all hearers away with it, and which I well remember.  His enthusiasm was boundless.  It entered into everything he said or did.  It belonged doubtless to that amazing fertility and wealth of ideas and feeling that distinguished his genius.

No one having any knowledge of the profession of literature can read Dickens’s private letters and not stand amazed at the unbounded affluence of imagery, sentiment, humour, and keen observation which he poured out in them.  There was no stint, no reservation for trade purposes.  So with his conversation—­every thought, every fancy, every feeling was expressed with the utmost vivacity and intensity, but a vivacity and intensity compatible with the most singular delicacy and nicety of touch when delicacy and nicety of touch were needed.

What were called the exaggerations of his writing were due, I have no doubt, to the extraordinary luminosity of his imagination.  He saw and rendered such an individuality as Mr. Pecksniff’s or Mrs. Nickleby’s for instance, something after the same fashion as a solar microscope renders any object observed through it.  The world in general beholds its Pecksniffs and its Mrs. Nicklebys through a different medium.  And at any rate Dickens got at the quintessence of his creatures, and enables us all, in our various measures, to perceive it too.  The proof of this is that we are constantly not only quoting the sayings and doings of his immortal characters, but are recognising other sayings and doings as what they would have said or done.

But it is impossible for one who knew him as I did to confine what he remembers of him either to traits of outward appearance or to appreciations of his genius.  I must say a few, a very few words of what Dickens appeared to me as a man.  I think that an epithet, which, much and senselessly as it has been misapplied and degraded, is yet, when rightly used, perhaps the grandest that can be applied to a human being, was especially applicable to him.  He was a hearty man, a large-hearted man that is to say.  He was perhaps the largest-hearted man I ever knew.  I think he made a nearer approach to obeying the divine precept, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” than one man in a hundred thousand.  His benevolence, his active, energising desire for good to all God’s creatures, and restless anxiety to be in some way active for the achieving of it, were unceasing and busy in his heart ever and always.

But he had a sufficient capacity for a virtue, which, I think, seems to be moribund among us—­the virtue of moral indignation.  Men and their actions were not all much of a muchness to him.  There was none of the indifferentism of that pseudo-philosophic moderation, which, when a scoundrel or a scoundrelly action is on the tapis, hints that there is much to be said on both sides.  Dickens hated a mean action or a mean sentiment as one hates something that is physically loathsome to the sight and touch.  And he could be angry, as those with whom he had been angry did not very readily forget.