all, when he wrote "Froment Jeune"--certainly had not read "Our Mutual Friend." But there is something of Dickens's genius in M. Daudet's, and that something is kept much better in hand by the Frenchman, is more subordinated to the principles of taste and of truth. On the other hand, to be done with this point, look at Delobelle, the father of Desiree, and compare him with Dickens's splendid strollers, with Mr. Vincent Crummles, and Mr. Lenville, and the rest. As in Desiree so in Delobelle, M. Daudet's picture is much the more truthful. But it is truthful with a bitter kind of truth. Now, there is nothing not genial and delightful in Crummles and Mrs. Crummles and the Infant Phenomenon. Here Dickens has got into a region unlike the region of the pathetic, into a world that welcomes _charge_ or caricature, the world of humour. We do not know, we never meet Crummleses quite so unsophisticated as Vincent, who is "not a Prussian," who "can't think who puts these things into the papers." But we do meet stage people who come very near to this _naivete_ of self-advertisement, and some of whom are just as dismal as Crummles is delightful. Here, no doubt, is Dickens's _forte_. Here his genius is all pure gold, in his successful studies or inventions of the humorous, of character parts. One literally does not know where to begin or end in one's admiration for this creative power that peopled our fancies with such troops of dear and impossible friends. "Pickwick" comes practically first, and he never surpassed "Pickwick." He was a poor story-teller, and in "Pickwick" he had no story to tell; he merely wandered at adventure in that merrier England which was before railways were. "Pickwick" is the last of the stories of the road that begin in the wandering, aimless, adventurous romances of Greece, or in Petronius Arbiter, and that live with the life of "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote," of "Le Roman Comique," of "Tom Jones" and "Joseph Andrews." These tales are progresses along highways bristling with adventure, and among inns full of confusion, Mr. Pickwick's affair with the lady with yellow curl-papers being a mild example. Though "Tom Jones" has a plot so excellent, no plot is needed here, and no consecutive story is required. Detached experiences, vagrants of every rank that come and go, as in real life, are all the material of the artist. With such materials Dickens was exactly suited; he was at home on high-road and lane, street and field- path, in inns and yeomen's warm hospitable houses. Never a humour escaped him, and he had such a wealth of fun and high spirits in these glad days as never any other possessed before. He was not in the least a bookish man, not in any degree a scholar; but Nature taught him, and while he wrote with Nature for his teacher, with men and women for his matter, with diversion for his aim, he was unsurpassable--nay, he was unapproachable.