In the case of Dickens, however, we can trace a well-marked, if rapid, advance. _Sketches by Boz_ are distinctly crude. _Pickwick Papers_ are a startling advance on one side of Dickens's art. We find in them the vigour, versatility, and exuberance of a youthful and tremendous imagination. They display inexhaustible resource and gigantic humour. Dickens lavished enough genius on them to do ten ordinary men for a lifetime, and yet he did it with perfect ease. We feel that he enjoyed himself in writing them, that he revelled in the task. Every character, down to the smallest, lives. Mr. John Swanker and Mr. Cyrus Bantam, for example, are as real to us as Mr. Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick. Pickwick is one of the greatest of humorous portraits in literature. It is as great as the _Canterbury Tales_. It is wonderful that a young writer who in _Sketches by Boz_ had only been feeling his way should, at one bound, reach the height of excellence which we find in _Pickwick_. The incidents are commonplace enough. The jokes are the sort of jokes which are still the stock-in-trade of the ha'penny comic--jokes about mothers-in-law, red-nosed curates, and falling on the ice, about getting drunk, and fighting, and fatness, and sitting upon one's hat. But what a difference between the treatment of Dickens and that of the uninspired humorists. _Pickwick_, however, as I have said, represents only one side of Dickens's art, but perhaps the greatest side, the humorous delineation of character. There is as yet no trace of Dickens the novelist (for by no stretch of the imagination can _Pickwick_ be called a novel), of Dickens the master of pathos, of Dickens the descriptive artist. There is, however, to be found in _Pickwick_ traces of a youthful phase in Dickens's character, a somewhat morbid leaning towards the horrible and criminal, afterwards toned down and corrected by his strong common sense, but never wholly absent. This trait is to be found in some of the short stories inserted in _Pickwick_, notably _The Madman's Tale_. The latter story might have served as a warning to some very discerning critic of the startling change to be found in Dickens's next book, _Oliver Twist_. In this work the lavish humour of _Pickwick_ dwindles down to very small proportions, and is decidedly overweighed by the horrible and morbid. The murder of Nancy and the death of Bill Sykes are only equalled for vivid awfulness a couple of times in Dickens's later books, notably in _Bleak House_ and in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. In _Oliver Twist_ appears a new element which was to take a prominent place in Dickens's future work, the element of social reform. Social reform had already produced the workhouse. Dickens started his reform by attacking the workhouse. But Dickens is not yet a novelist. The romantic element is absent in _Oliver Twist_; the hero is only a child.