character, above noticed, it was never exactly the same. These and other gifts were shown in a long line of novels covering just thirty years, from _Boz to Our Mutual Friend_; for the last few years of his life, disturbed by his American tour, by increasing ill-health, and other things, produced nothing but the beginnings of an unfinished novel, _Edwin Drood_. He attempted little besides novels, and what he did attempt outside of them was not very fortunate, except the delightful _Uncommercial Traveller_, wherein in his later days he achieved a sort of mellowed version of the _Boz_ sketches, subdued more to the actual, but not in the least tamed or weakened. Although a keen lover of the theatre and an amateur actor of remarkable merit, he had the sense and self-denial never to attempt plays except in an indirect fashion and in one or two instances, nor ever in his own name solely. His _Child's History of England_ (1854) is probably the worst book ever written by a man of genius, except Shelley's novels, and has not, like them, the excuse of extreme youth. His _Pictures from Italy_ (1845), despite vivid passages, are quite unworthy of him; and even the _American Notes_ could be dispensed with without a sigh, seeing that we have _Martin Chuzzlewit_. But his novels, despite their many faults, could not be dispensed with,--no one who understands literary value would give up even the worst of them,--while his earlier "Christmas Books" (during the fancy for these things in the forties) and his later contributions to the Christmas numbers of his periodicals contain some of his best fantastic and pathetic work. _Pickwick_ was immediately followed by _Oliver Twist_,--a very popular book, and in parts a very powerful one, but containing in germ most of the faults which afterwards developed themselves, and, with the exception of the "Artful Dodger," not bringing out any of his great character-creations. _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1838) is a story designed to fix a stigma on cheap private schools, and marred by some satire as cheap as the schools themselves on the fashionable and aristocratic society of which to his dying day Dickens never knew anything; but it is of great interest as a story, and full of admirable humoristic sketches, which almost if not quite excused not merely the defect of knowledge just referred to, but the author's unfortunate proneness to attempt irony, of which he had no command, and argument, of which he had if possible less. His next two stories, _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_, were enshrined (1840-41) in an odd framework of fantastic presentation, under the general title of _Master Humphrey's Clock_,--a form afterwards discarded with some advantage, but also with some loss. _The Old Curiosity Shop_, strongly commended to its own public and seriously hampered since by some rather maudlin pathos, improved even upon _Nicholas Nickleby_ in the humoristic vein; and while Dick Swiveller, Codlin and Short, Mr. Chuckster, and