It gave me delight to get your letter--the greater in that you talk to me of Dickens. I never tire of him nor of talking of him. But I was not unprepared for your enthusiasm. I remember only the last time we touched on the topic it was already brewing. I am struck above all by what you feel about the composer’s gift in him, that unconscious power of massing and moulding his material, the instructive adjustment of varying currents in the narrative, so that--as he traces the courses in which they run, we recognise in wonderment that they are confluent streams though often seeming for the time to flow so far asunder. Even the most modest of us are, I think, sometimes aware that there is a force outside ourselves which holds the reins of our fancy and that we must needs obey; but the exercise of that faculty in Dickens approaches the miraculous. At times it would almost seem as if he threw down the gauntlet to himself, directly challenging his own powers of artistic control by flinging at his own feet the unsifted harvest of the most prodigal invention with which man was ever endowed and defying the artist in him to reduce it to order and harmony. And yet the artist invariably wins and by a victory so complete as to cheat us into the belief that every obstacle he subdues was an integral feature of the original design. Inexhaustible invention and unfailing control, these are the things that always seem to me to set Dickens on an eminence which he shares with no one in his own time and with only a few in our creative literature of any time. Shakespeare stands there--as he stands everywhere, no matter what the quality to be appraised or what the arena in which it finds exercise, above all rivalry; and Walter Scott most surely and securely too; and ... well, I don’t feel able to be certain about any others!... I am not disposed to quarrel about _Bleak House_, I do not like it; but that story and _Little Dorrit_ have always been my stumbling blocks. On the other hand I heartily agree about _Our Mutual Friend_; I think it illustrates a giant’s way with Nature which becomes a fawning slave before the tyranny of genius. Yours ever, JOE.” CHAPTER VI BOOKS AND TRAVEL Of work in volume form my husband left comparatively little, and all the books of his earlier years were on Art. His criticisms on the various exhibitions of Old Masters at Burlington House, chiefly written at that time for the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the _Art Journal_, were useful to him in a volume on _The Drawings of the Old Masters_ in the British Museum, upon which subject he was a careful and enthusiastic student; and at a somewhat later period--when he and Mr. C. E. Hallé organized the famous exhibitions of those drawings at the Grosvenor Gallery--a recognised connoisseur.