by Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nickleby, and Copperfield.  And though these tales will long continue to delight both old and young, learned and unlearned alike, they are most to be envied who read him when young, and they are most to be pitied who read him with a critical spirit.  May that be far from us, as we take up our Pickwick and talk over the autobiographic pathos of David Copperfield.

This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him, was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work.  Though I never spoke to him, there were times when I saw him almost daily; I heard him speak and read in public; and his favourite haunts in London and the country have been familiar to me from my boyhood.  And thus, as I read again my Pickwick, and Nickleby, and Copperfield, there come back to me many personal and local memories of my own.  The personality of Charles Dickens was, even to his distant readers, vivid and intense; and hence it is much more so to those who have known his person.  I am thus an ardent Pickwickian myself; and anything I say about our immortal Founder must be understood in a Pickwickian sense.

Charles Dickens was before all things a great humourist—­doubtless the greatest of this century; for, though we may find in Scott a more truly Shakespearean humour of the highest order, the humour of Dickens is so varied, so paramount, so inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our memory as the humourist of the age.  Swift, Fielding, Hogarth, Sterne, and Goldsmith, in the last century, reached at times a more enduring level of humour without caricature; but the gift has been more rarely imparted to their successors in the age of steam.  Now, we shall never get an adequate definition of that imponderable term—­humour—­a term which, perhaps, was invented to be the eternal theme of budding essayists.  We need not be quite as liberal in our interpretation of humour as was Thackeray in opening his English Humourists; for he declared that its business was to awaken and direct our love, our pity, our kindness, our scorn for imposture, our tenderness for the weak, to comment on the actions and passions of life, to be the week-day preacher—­and much more to that effect.  But it may serve our immediate purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is “grotesque imagery”; and “grotesque” is “distorted of figure; unnatural.”  That is to say, humour is an effort of the imagination presenting human nature with some element of distortion or disproportion which instantly kindles mirth.  It must be imaginative; it must touch the bed-rock of human nature; it must arouse merriment and not anger or scorn.  In this fine and most rare gift Charles Dickens abounded to overflowing; and this humour poured in perfect cataracts of “grotesque imagery” over every phase of life of the poor and the lower middle classes of his time, in London and a few of its suburbs and neighbouring parts.