described in Roderick Random; yet in another respect these books are nearer to us, of more familiar spirit, than the novel—whatever it may be—newest from the press and in greatest vogue. They are a part of our nationality; in both of them runs our very life-blood. However great the changes on the surface of life, England remains, and is likely to remain, the same at heart with the England of our eighteenth-century novelists. By communing with them, one breaks through the disguises of modern fashion, gauges the importance of "progress," and learns to recognize the historically essential. Before the end of this essay, I shall have often insisted on the value of Dickens's work as an expression of national life and sentiment. Born, of course, with the aptitude for such utterance, he could not have had better schooling than in the lumber-room library at Rochester. There he first heard the voice of his own thoughts. And to those books we also must turn, if the fury of to-day's existence leave us any inclination or leisure for a study of the conditions which produced Charles Dickens.
His choice of a pseudonym for the title-page of his Sketches is significant, for, as he tells us himself, "Boz" was simply a facetious nasal contraction, used in his family, of the nickname
