So it was then that his huge felicity, to re-emphasise our term, was in his state of circulating where recognitions and identifications didn’t so much await as rejoicingly assault him, having never yet in all the world, grudged or at the best suspected feeders as they were at the board where sentiment occupied the head, felt themselves so finely important or subject to such a worried intention. They hung over a scene as to which it was one of the forces of his inspiration that history had lately been there at work, with incomparable energy and inimitable art, to pile one upon another, not to say squeeze and dovetail violently into each other, after such a fashion as might defy competition anywhere, her successive deposits and layers of form and order, her restless determinations of appearance—so like those of the different “states” of an engraver’s impression; all to an effect which _should_ have constituted, as by a miracle of coincidence it did, the paradise of an extraordinary observer. Balzac lived accordingly, extraordinary since he was, in an earthly heaven so near perfect for his kind of vision that he could have come at no moment more conceivably blest to him. The later part of the eighteenth century, with the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration, had inimitably conspired together to scatter abroad their separate marks and stigmas, their separate trails of character and physiognomic hits—for which advantage he might have arrived too late, as his hapless successors, even his more or less direct imitators, visibly have done. The fatal fusions and uniformities inflicted on our newer generations, the running together of all the differences of form and tone, the ruinous liquefying wash of the great industrial brush over the old conditions of contrast and colour, doubtless still have left the painter of manners much to do, but have ground him down to the sad fact that his ideals of differentiation, those inherent oppositions from type to type, in which drama most naturally resides, have well-nigh perished. They pant for life in a hostile air; and we may surely say that their last successful struggle, their last bright resistance to eclipse among ourselves, was in their feverish dance to the great fiddling of Dickens. Dickens made them dance, we seem to see, caper and kick their heels, wave their arms, and above all agitate their features, for the simple reason that he couldn’t make them stand or sit _at once_ quietly and expressively, couldn’t make them look straight out as for themselves—quite in fact as through his not daring to, not feeling he could afford to, in a changing hour when ambiguities and the wavering line, droll and “dodgy” dazzlements and the possibly undetected factitious alone, might be trusted to keep him right with an incredibly uncritical public, a public blind to the difference between a shade and a patch.