orders of society and classes of human creatures.  The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his characters, exaggerated, degenerated, and stereotyped itself in a fashion which it is difficult to think satisfactory to anybody.  He was, moreover, a “novelist of purpose” in the highest degree; he had very strong, but very crude—­not to say absurd—­political ideas; and he was apt to let the great powers of pathos, of humour, of vivid description, which he possessed to “get out of hand” and to land him in the maudlin, the extravagant, and the bombastic.

But—­to put ourselves in connection with the main thread of our story once more—­he not only himself provided a great amount of the novel pleasure for his readers, but he infused into the novel generally something of a new spirit.  It has been more than once pointed out that there is almost more danger with the novel of “getting into ruts” than with any kind of literature.  Nobody could charge the Dickens novel with doing this, except as regards mannerisms of style, and though it might inspire many, it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else.  He liked to call himself “the inimitable,” and so, in a way, he was.  Imitations of him were, of course, tried:  but they were all bad and obvious failures.  Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel; against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating.  He might have a hundred faults—­he was in fact never faultless, except in Pickwick, which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing to compare with it and show up faults (if it has any) by the comparison.  But you can read him again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight of a kind given by no other novelist.[21]

[21] It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of Dickens’s individual novels.  They are almost all well known to almost everybody:  and special discussion of them would be superfluous, while their general characteristics and positions in novel-history are singularly uniform and can be described together.

The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is as different from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the two were in their own progress and development.  In fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian parallel between them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a parallel almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in matter almost incommensurable.  In the first place, Dickens, as we have seen, and as Thackeray said (with the generous and characteristic addition “at the head of the whole tribe"),