It was precisely so in regard to his personal appearance. When the time suddenly arrived that he could indulge his taste in dress without fear of financial consequences, he did so hilariously and to the fullest extent. Here is a description of him as he appeared to an American girl at an evening party in Cincinnati eighty years ago. “He is young and handsome, has a mellow beautiful eye, fine brow and abundant hair.... His manner is easy and negligent, but not elegant. His dress was foppish.... He had a dark coat with lighter pantaloons; a black waistcoat embroidered with coloured flowers; and about his neck, covering his white shirt-front, was a black neck-cloth also embroidered with colours, on which were two large diamond pins connected by a chain; a gold watch-chain and a large red rose in his buttonhole completed his toilet.” The young lady does not seem to have been delighted with this costume. But Dickens did not dress to please her, he dressed to please himself. His taste was so exuberant that it naturally effervesced in this kind of raiment. There was certainly nothing immoral about it. He had paid for it and he had a right to wear it, for to him it seemed beautiful. He would have been amazed to know that any young lady did not like it; and her opinion would probably have had little effect upon him, for he wrote of the occasion on which this candid girl met him, as follows: “In the evening we went to a party at Judge Walker’s and were introduced to at least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, separately and singly.” But what does it all amount to, this lack of discretion in manners, this want of reserve in speech, this oriental luxuriance in attire? It simply goes to show that _Dickens himself was a Dickens character_. He was vivid, florid, inexhaustible, and untamed. There was material in the little man for a hundred of his own immortal caricatures. The self-portrait that he has drawn in _David Copperfield_ is too smooth, like a retouched photograph. That is why David is less interesting than half-a-dozen other people in the book. If Dickens could have seen his own humourous aspects in the magic mirror of his fancy, it would have been among the richest of his observations, and if he could have let his enchantment loose upon the subject, not even the figures of Dick Swiveller and Harold Skimpole would have been more memorable than the burlesque of “Boz” by the hand of C. D. But the humourous, the extravagant, the wildly picturesque,—would these have given a true and complete portrait of the man? Does it make any great difference what kind of clothes he wore, or how many blunders of taste and tact he made, even tragic blunders like his inability to refrain from telling the world all about his domestic unhappiness,—does all this count for much when we look back upon the wonders which his imagination wrought in fiction, and upon the generous fruits which his heart brought forth in life?