volved in melodrama of the feeblest description; towards the end of the story there are wastes of stagey dialogue and action, unreadable by any but the very young. All this is quite unworthy of the author, but, following upon Oliver, it indicated the limits of his power as a novelist. Dickens never had command of "situation," though he was strong in incident. A great situation must be led up to by careful and skilful foresight in character and event—precisely where his resources always failed him. Thus, scenes which he intended, and perhaps thought, to be very effective fall flat through their lack of substance. A mature reader turns away in disgust, and, if he belong to a hasty school of modern criticism, henceforth declares that Dickens is hopelessly antiquated, and was always vastly overpraised.
Here, for the last time, we have episodic stories; admissible enough in a book which, for all its faults, smacks so of the leisurely old fiction. In The Old Curiosity Shop, which came next, there is more originality of design: one does not smell the footlights, but has, instead, delicious wafts of freshness from the fields and lanes of England. Of course we find an initial vice of construction, inseparable from Dickens's habit at that time of beginning to write without any settled scheme. Master Humphrey opens
