originality, its irrepressible drolleries, its substantial human nature, and its intense vitality, place it quite in a class by itself.  We can no more group it, or test it by any canon of criticism, than we could group or define Pantagruel or Faust.  There are some works of genius which seem to transcend all criticism, of which the very extravagances and incoherences increase the charm.  And Pickwick ought to live with Gil Blas and Tristram Shandy.  In a deeper vein, the tragic scenes in Oliver Twist and in Barnaby Rudge must long hold their ground, for they can be read and re-read in youth, in manhood, in old age.  The story of Dotheboys Hall, the Yarmouth memories of Copperfield, Little Nell, Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Toots, Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and many more will long continue to delight the youth of the English-speaking races.  But few writers are remembered so keenly by certain characters, certain scenes, incidental whimsies, and so little for entire novels treated strictly as works of art.  There is no reason whatever for pretending that all these scores of tales are at all to be compared with the best of them, or that the invention of some inimitable scenes and characters is enough to make a supreme and faultless artist.  The young and the uncritical make too much of Charles Dickens, when they fail to distinguish between his best and his worst.  Their fastidious seniors make too little of him, when they note his many shortcomings and fail to see that in certain elements of humour he has no equal and no rival.  If we mean Charles Dickens to live we must fix our eye on these supreme gifts alone.

VII

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

They who are still youthful in the nineties can hardly understand the thrill which went through us all in the forties upon the appearance of Jane Eyre, on the discovery of a new genius and a new style.  The reputation of most later writers grew by degrees and by repeated impressions of good work.  Trollope, George Eliot, Stevenson, George Meredith, did not conquer the interest of the larger public until after many books and by gradual widening of the judgment of experts.  But little Charlotte Bronte, who published but three tales in six years and who died at the age of thirty-eight, bounded into immediate fame—­a fame that after nearly fifty years we do not even now find to have been excessive.

And then, there was such personal interest in the writer’s self, in her intense individuality, in her strong character; there was so much sympathy with her hard and lonely life; there was such pathos in her family history and the tragedy which threw gloom over her whole life, and cut it off in youth after a few months of happiness.  To have lived in poverty, in a remote and wild moorland, almost friendless and in continual struggle against sickness, to have been motherless since the age of five, to have lost