what Ralph, and Monk, and Jonas Chuzzlewit are plotting. It may not
be that the plot is so confused, but that we are too much diverted
to care for the plot, for the incredible machinations of Uriah Heap,
to choose another example. Mr. Micawber cleared these up; but it is
Mr. Micawber that hinders us from heeding them.

This, at least, is a not unfriendly explanation. Yet I cannot but
believe that, though Dickens took great pains with his plots, he was
not a great plotter. He was not, any more than Thackeray, a story-
teller first and foremost. We can hold in our minds every thread of
Mr. Wilkie Collins' web, or of M. Fortune du Boisgobey's, or of M.
Gaboriau's--all great weavers of intrigues. But Dickens goes about
darkening his intrigue, giving it an extra knot, an extra twist,
hinting here, ominously laughing there, till we get mystified and
bored, and give ourselves up to the fun of the humours, indifferent
to the destinies of villains and victims. Look at "Edwin Drood." A
constant war about the plot rages in the magazines. I believe, for
one, that Edwin Drood was resuscitated; but it gives me no pleasure.
He was too uninteresting. Dickens's hints, nods, mutterings,
forebodings, do not at all impress one like that deepening and
darkening of the awful omens in "The Bride of Lammermoor." Here
Scott--unconsciously, no doubt--used the very manner of Homer in the
Odyssey, and nowhere was his genius more Homeric. That was romance.

The "Tale of Two Cities" is a great test of the faith--that is in
Dickensites. Of all his works it is the favourite with the wrong
sort! Ladies prefer it. Many people can read it who cannot
otherwise read Dickens at all. This in itself proves that it is not
a good example of Dickens, that it is not central, that it is an
outlying province which he conquered. It is not a favourite of