Take, for example, Dickens's humorous characters. There are some who cannot be got to admit that Mr. Toots, Sim Tappertit, Sairey Gamp, and others of that ilk are divinely humorous and inspired creations; some will only admit that at best they are but "excellent fooling"; others will even characterize them as mere buffoonery. It is an inferior class of mind, however, which rejects the abnormal merely on account of its abnormality, and votes the improbable impossible, because it fails to fit in with previously conceived ideas of right and wrong. Criticism is useless in the case of people who hold such a view. I may assert, with all the force of which I am capable, that Mr. Toots is the best thing in Dombey; that age cannot wither Sairey Gamp any more than Cleopatra, and that she will blossom in perennial freshness while the language endures; but if you ask me for a reason, I can give none. It is no more possible to give a reason for liking Sairey Gamp than for disliking Dr. Fell. We can enjoy with Thackeray the skilful dissection of a character like that of Becky Sharp, and penetrate with him the innermost recesses of her mighty little soul; but Dickens himself could not have penetrated the secret of the composition of Sairey Gamp. In her presence criticism is dumb. We must be content to stand in humble and reverent admiration and satisfy ourselves with exclaiming, "Behold, it is very good." I shall return again to this point of characterization, but I must now say something of the position held by Dickens and Thackeray in the historical development of the novel. Though undoubtedly the two greatest novelists of the Early Victorian school, Dickens and Thackeray are alike in exercising very little apparent influence on the development of the contemporary novel of manners. They both look back rather than forward. They set the crown and consummation on the work of the early eighteenth-century group of writers. Dickens derives from Smollett, and Thackeray from Fielding. When Dickens as a boy discovered in an old garret that precious pile of dusty eighteenth-century books, _Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker_ and the rest, which he absorbed with such loving eagerness, he little thought that he was destined to be a second and a greater Smollett.