In exaggeration too we find the defect of Dickens's highest quality. His humour, like the humour of the country he at first satirised so bitterly, rests too much on exaggeration. It is ready, copious, irresistible; but, while it wins and deserves admiration, it rarely provokes the exclamation, 'how natural,' or 'how true.' Micawber is one of the most comical characters in fiction, but we are not struck by his fidelity to nature. Though he is drawn from the life he is not representative, but rather belongs to the class of curiosities whose natural resting-place is a museum. The mannerism of which this is one form runs through the whole of the work of Dickens, affecting style as well as substance, the description of nature as well as the delineation of character. The English is nervous and vivid, but little regard is paid to proportion. The minutest detail, if it happens to strike the writer's fancy, is elaborated as if it were vital to the story. The moaning of the sea, the freaks of the wind, the fluttering of a leaf, are dilated upon in paragraph after paragraph. It is the romantic method liberated from all restraint. There is no poetry more heavily charged with the 'pathetic fallacy' than the prose of Dickens; and in prose it is more dangerous because of the absence of the trammels of verse. The dangers of this style and this manner of conception become more conspicuous when we turn to other manifestations of them. Dickens was in his own time thought to be a master of the pathetic equally with the mirthful strain. It was correct taste to weep over little Nell; and Jeffrey, no very indulgent critic of contemporaries, declared that there had been nothing so good since Cordelia. Dickens has been dead only a quarter of a century, but few critics would pronounce such a judgment now. His humour so far retains its power; but the veneer has already worn off his pathos. Little Nell and little Emily may still draw tears, more tears perhaps than were ever shed for the fate of Cordelia. But this is not the best test of the quality of pathos. That which, from Homer to Shakespeare, has conquered the suffrages of the world, is solemnising and saddening, rather than tear-compelling. Tears are within the range of a very ordinary writer, but to produce a tragic Cordelia or Antigone is only possible to a Shakespeare or a Sophocles. The truth is that the faults of Dickens, apparent in his humour but pardonable there, become offensive in his pathos. His touch is not sufficiently delicate, he does not know when to leave off, he unduly prolongs the agony. The death-scene of Cordelia and Lear, perhaps the most tragically pathetic in all literature, occupies some sixty or seventy lines. How different from this are the scenes relating to the death of Little Nell! Their very diffuseness has contributed to their popularity, but it damages them as literature.