In this attitude, I think, Dickens was not only natural, and true to his bringing-up, but also wise as a great artist in literature. For I have observed that brilliant writers, while often profitable as satirists to expose abuses, are seldom judicious as legislators to plan reforms. Before we leave this subject of the effects of Dickens’s early poverty and sudden popularity, we must consider his alleged lack of refinement. Some say that he was vulgar, others that he was ungrateful and inconsiderate of the feelings of his friends and relations, others that he had little or no taste. I should rather say, in the words of the old epigram, that he had a great deal of taste, and that some of it was very bad. Take the matter of his caricaturing real people in his books. No one could object to his use of the grotesque insolence of a well-known London magistrate as the foundation of his portrait of Mr. Fang in _Oliver Twist._ That was public property. But the amiable eccentricities of his own father and mother, the airy irresponsible ways of his good friend Leigh Hunt, were private property. Yet even here Dickens could not reasonably be blamed for observing them, for being amused by them, or for letting them enrich his general sense of the immense, incalculable, and fantastic humour of the world. Taste, which is simply another name for the gusto of life, has a comic side; and a man who is keenly sensitive to everything cannot be expected to be blind to the funny things that happen among his family and friends. But when Dickens used these private delights for the public amusement, and in such a form that the partial portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Nickleby, and Harold Skimpole were easily identified, all that we can say is that his taste was still there, but it had gone bad. What could you expect? Where, in his early years, was he likely to have learned the old-fashioned habit of reserve in regard to private affairs, which you may call either a mark of good manners, or a sign of silly pride, according to your own education? Or take his behavior during his first visit to America in 1842, and immediately after his return to England. His reception was enough to turn anybody’s head. “There never was a king or emperor,” wrote Dickens to a friend, “so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners, and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds.” This was at the beginning. At the end he was criticized by all, condemned by many, and abused by some of the newspapers. Why? Chiefly because he used the dinners given in his honour as occasions to convict the Americans of their gross national sin of literary piracy, and because when he got home he wrote a book of _American Notes_, containing some very severe strictures upon the country which had just entertained him so magnificently.