assisted the flow of his imagination than hindered it. He began very
young; he had curiously little literature; his knowledge of life,
extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by
which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse
communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures.
The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not
infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he
was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of
attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his
characters, exaggerated, degenerated, and stereotyped itself in a
fashion which it is difficult to think satisfactory to anybody. He was,
moreover, a "novelist of purpose" in the highest degree; he had very
strong, but very crude--not to say absurd--political ideas; and he was
apt to let the great powers of pathos, of humour, of vivid description,
which he possessed to "get out of hand" and to land him in the maudlin,
the extravagant, and the bombastic.

But--to put ourselves in connection with the main thread of our story
once more--he not only himself provided a great amount of the novel
pleasure for his readers, but he infused into the novel generally
something of a new spirit. It has been more than once pointed out that
there is almost more danger with the novel of "getting into ruts" than
with any kind of literature. Nobody could charge the Dickens novel with
doing this, except as regards mannerisms of style, and though it might
inspire many, it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else. He
liked to call himself "the inimitable," and so, in a way, he was.
Imitations of him were, of course, tried: but they were all bad and
obvious failures. Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel;
against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic
romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once