It is only fair to say, however, that the caricature to be found in Dickens is scarcely more violent an extreme to some minds than is the idealism to be found in Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Blake an opposite extreme to minds otherwise constituted. The early life of Wordsworth, passed, as he tells us, in the solitude of nature, explains much of his subsequent attitude toward childhood and youth. It is out of such an experience that Lucy Gray was written. In like manner the early life of Dickens discloses something of a nature which reappears afterward in his pictures of childhood. A wounded sensibility is unquestionably the pathetic history of many, and Dickens has contributed to the natural history of childhood a distinct account of this feature. The first appearance of a new form in literature produces an impression which can never be repeated. However freshly readers in this decade may come to the works of Dickens, it is impossible that they should have the same distinct sensation which men and women had who caught up the numbers of The Old Curiosity Shop as they fell from the press for the first time. There can never again be such a lamentation over Little Nell, when men like Jeffrey, a hardened old critic, made no concealment of their tears. Yet I am disposed to think that this does not give a complete account of the phenomenon. Just as Wordsworth’s Alice Fell is now but one of a procession of forlorn maidens, though at the head of it, so the children of Dickens are merely somewhat more vivid personages in a multitude of childish creation. The child is no longer a novelty either in poetry or in fiction. It is an accepted character, one of the _dramatis personæ_ of literature. For, when all is said of Dickens’s work, taken only as the product of a mind singularly gifted with reporting what it has seen, there remains the noticeable fact that scarcely had the echoes died away from the voice of Wordsworth, who ushered in the literature of the new age, when a great man of the people came forward, in the person of Dickens, and found it the most natural thing in the world to give men pictures of child-life, and that after the first surprise attendant upon novelty was over, writers of all sorts were busy modeling these small figures. * * * * *