world of subsidiary incidents thronged with all sorts of characters.  What might not one say about Dr. Blimber’s genteel academy at Brighton; and the Toodles family, so humble in station and intellect and so large of heart; and the contrast between Carker the manager and his brother, who for some early dishonest act, long since repented of, remains always Carker the junior; and about Captain Cuttle, and that poor, muddled nautical philosopher, Captain Bunsby, and the Game Chicken, and Mrs. Pipchin, and Miss Tox; and Cousin Feenix with wilful legs so little under control, and yet to the core of him a gentleman; and the apoplectic Major Bagstock, the Joey B. who claimed to be “rough and tough and devilish sly;” and Susan Nipper, as swift of tongue as a rapier, and as sharp?  Reader, don’t you know all these people?  For myself, I have jostled against them constantly any time the last twenty years.  They are as much part of my life as the people I meet every day.

But there is one person whom I have left out of my enumeration, not certainly because I don’t know him, for I know him very well, but because I want to speak about him more particularly.  That person is my old friend, Mr. Toots; and the special point in his character which induces me to linger is the slight touch of craziness that sits so charmingly upon him.  M. Taine, the French critic, in his chapters on Dickens, repeats the old remark that genius and madness are near akin.[20] He observes, and observes truly, that Dickens describes so well because an imagination of singular intensity enables him to see the object presented, and at the same time to impart to it a kind of visionary life.  “That imagination,” says M. Taine, “is akin to the imagination of the monomaniac.”  And, starting from this point, he proceeds to show, here again quite truly, with what admirable sympathetic power and insight Dickens has described certain cases of madness, as in Mr. Dick.  But here, having said some right things, M. Taine goes all wrong.  According to him, these portraits of persons who have lost their wits, “however amusing they may seem at first sight,” are “horrible.”  They could only have been painted by “an imagination such as that of Dickens, excessive, disordered, and capable of hallucination.”  He seems to be not far from thinking that only our splenetic and melancholy race could have given birth to such literary monsters.  To speak like this, as I conceive, shows a singular misconception of the instinct or set purpose that led Dickens to introduce these characters into his novels at all.  It is perfectly true that he has done so several times.  Barnaby Rudge, the hero of the book of the same name, is half-witted.  Mr. Dick, in “David Copperfield,” is decidedly crazy.  Mr. Toots is at least simple.  Little Miss Flite, in “Bleak House,” haunting the Law Courts in expectation of a judgment on the Day of Judgment, is certainly not compos mentis.  And one may concede to M. Taine that some element of