attains an artistic finish hardly found elsewhere; and to these I shall return. There were reasons why the book should be lacking in the old vivacity—never indeed to be recovered, in so far as it had belonged to the golden years of youth; it was written in a time of domestic unhappiness and of much unsettlement, the natural result of which appeared three years later, when Dickens left the study for the platform. As a narrative, Little Dorrit is far from successful; it is cumbered with mysteries which prove futile, and has no proportion in its contrasting parts. Here and there the hand of the master is plainly weary.
More so, however, in the only other full-length novel which he lived to complete. None of his books is so open to the charge of tedious superfluity as Our Mutual Friend (1865); on many a page dialogue which is strictly no dialogue at all, but mere verbosity in a vein of forced humour, drags its slow length along in caricature of the author at his best. A plot, depending on all manner of fantastic circumstances, unfolds itself with dreary elaboration, and surely gratifies no one. Yet I have a sense of ingratitude in speaking thus of Our Mutual Friend; for in it Dickens went far towards breaking with his worst theatrical
