Dickens can never have intended Edith, from the first, to behave as
she did! People may have influenced him, as they influenced Scott
about "St. Ronan's Well." It has been said that, save for Carlyle,
Dickens was in letters a self-taught artist, that he was no man's
pupil, and borrowed from none. No doubt this makes him less
acceptable to the literary class than a man of letters, like
Thackeray--than a man in whose treasure chamber of memory all the
wealth of the Middle Ages was stored, like Scott. But the native
naked genius of Dickens,--his heart, his mirth, his observation, his
delightful high spirits, his intrepid loathing of wrong, his
chivalrous desire to right it,--these things will make him for ever,
we hope and believe, the darling of the English people.



ADVENTURES OF BUCCANEERS



Most of us, as boys, have envied the buccaneers. The greatest of
all boys, Canon Kingsley, once wrote a pleasing and regretful poem
in which the Last Buccaneer represents himself as a kind of
picturesque philanthropist:-


"There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,
All furnished well with small arms, and cannons round about;
And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free,
To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.
Thence we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and