The "Tale of Two Cities" is a great test of the faith--that is in Dickensites. Of all his works it is the favourite with the wrong sort! Ladies prefer it. Many people can read it who cannot otherwise read Dickens at all. This in itself proves that it is not a good example of Dickens, that it is not central, that it is an outlying province which he conquered. It is not a favourite of mine. The humour of the humorous characters rings false--for example, the fun of the resurrection-man with the wife who "flops." But Sidney Carton has drawn many tears down cheeks not accustomed to what Mr. B. in "Pamela" calls "pearly fugitives." It sometimes strikes one that certain weaknesses in our great novelists, in Thackeray as well as Dickens, were caused by their method of publication. The green and yellow leaves flourished on the trees for two whole years. Who (except Alexandre the Great) could write so much, and yet all good? Do we not all feel that "David Copperfield" should have been compressed? As to "Pendennis," Mr. Thackeray's bad health when he wrote it might well cause a certain languor in the later pages. Moreover, he frankly did not care for the story, and bluffly says, in the preface, that he respited Colonel Altamont almost at the foot of the gallows. Dickens took himself more in earnest, and, having so many pages to fill, conscientiously made Uriah Heap wind and wriggle through them all. To try to see blots in the sun, and to pick holes in Dickens, seems ungrateful, and is indeed an ungrateful task; to no mortal man have more people owed mirth, pleasure, forgetfulness of care, knowledge of life in strange places. There never was such another as Charles Dickens, nor shall we see his like sooner than the like of Shakespeare. And he owed all to native genius and hard work; he owed almost nothing to literature, and that little we regret. He was influenced by Carlyle, he adopted his method of nicknames, and of hammering with wearisome iteration on some peculiarity--for example, on Carker's teeth, and the patriarch's white hair. By the way, how incredible is all the Carker episode in "Dombey"! Surely Dickens can never have intended Edith, from the first, to behave as she did! People may have influenced him, as they influenced Scott about "St. Ronan's Well." It has been said that, save for Carlyle, Dickens was in letters a self-taught artist, that he was no man's pupil, and borrowed from none. No doubt this makes him less acceptable to the literary class than a man of letters, like Thackeray--than a man in whose treasure chamber of memory all the wealth of the Middle Ages was stored, like Scott. But the native naked genius of Dickens,--his heart, his mirth, his observation, his delightful high spirits, his intrepid loathing of wrong, his chivalrous desire to right it,--these things will make him for ever, we hope and believe, the darling of the English people. ADVENTURES OF BUCCANEERS