the play, for instance, they do take him. They don't go in after it's begun, or come out before it's over.

They know how to bring a boy up, too. Look at their own! Though he is very little as yet, what a capital boy he is! Why, my next favourite to Mrs. Cheeseman and Old Cheeseman is young Cheeseman.

When Dickens came to his last book his heart was still full of sympathy with the child.

Edwin Drood said to Mr. Jasper: "Life for you is a plum with the natural bloom on. It hasn't been overcarefully wiped off for you."

In the same book Mr. Grewgious is described:

He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody's voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature that his face presented was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said, "I really can not be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is."

He tried to explain the reason for his peculiarities to Rosa:

"I mean," he explained, "that young ways were never my ways. I was the only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I was born advanced in life myself. No personality is intended toward the name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general growth of people seem to have come into existence buds, I seem to have come into existence a chip. I was a chip-and a very dry one-when I first became aware of myself."

Dickens takes a front rank among the educators who have tried to save the child from child-quellers," and preserve for them the right to a free, rich, real childhood. The saddest sight in the world to him was a child such

as he pictured in A Tale of Two Cities: "The children of St. Antoine had ancient faces and grave voices."

In Barbox Brothers Mr. Jackson said of himself: "I am, to myself, an unintelligible book, with the earlier chapters all torn out and thrown away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?"

Dickens tried to save all children from such a beginning.

CHAPTER VII.

INDIVIDUALITY.

DICKENS began to write definitely about individuality in Martin Chuzzlewit in 1844. Martin described a company he met in America "who were so strangely devoid of individual traits of character that any one of them might have changed minds with the other and nobody Iwould have found it out."

In David Copperfield he makes Traddles, who was trained by Mr. Creakle, say: "I have no invention at all, not a particle. I suppose there never was a young man with less originality than I have."

David himself said sagely: "I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars."

David emphasizes the phase of individuality that teaches the power of each individual to do some special good, when he said to Martha when she spoke of the river as the end of her useless life:

"In the name of the great Judge, before whom you and all of us must stand at his dread time, dismiss that terrible idea! We can all do some good, if we will."

In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock is represented as of opinion that he should at least think for every one in connection with his estate.

The present representative of the Dedlocks is an exIcellent master. He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned-would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.

The same absolute contempt for the individuality of the poor is ridiculed in The Chimes. Sir Joseph Bowley is a type of the English squire who used to act on the assumption that he had to care for the workmen on his estate, and the poor of his neighbourhood, as he did for his horses and other animals.

"I do my duty as the Poor Man's Friend and Father; and I endeavour to educate his mind by inculcating on all occasions the one great moral lesson which that class requires that is, entire Dependence on myself. They have no business whatever with-with themselves. If wicked and designing persons tell them otherwise, and they become impatient and discontented, and are guilty of insubordinate conduct and black-hearted ingratitude-which is undoubtedly the case-I am their Friend and Father still. It is so ordained. It is in the nature of things. They needn't trouble themselves to think about anything. I will think for them; I know what is good for them; I am their perpetual parent. Such is the dispensation of an all-wise Providence."

It is strange that men so commonly ascribe to Providence the dreadful conditions which have resulted from man's ignorance and selfishness, and which Providence intended man to reform.

Esther, in Bleak House, speaking of the influence of the chancery suit on Richard Carstone, said:

"The character of much older and steadier people may be even changed by the circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect that a boy's, in its formation, should be the subject of such influences, and escape them."

I felt this to be true; though, if I may venture to mention what I thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard's education had not counteracted those influences or directed his character. He had been eight years at a public school, and had learned, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts, in the most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the verses, and had

learned the art of making them to such perfection, that if he had remained at school until he was of age I suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again, unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it. Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.

Richard was one of those unstable men who have good abilities, but who do not use them persistently in the accomplishment of any one purpose, and who never seem to find the sphere for which they are best fitted. They are man-products, not God-products. When Richard, after several attempts to work at other things with high enthusiasm for a few weeks, decided to be a physician, Esther said:

Mistrusting that he only came to this conclusion because, having never had much chance of finding out for himself what he was fitted for, and having never been guided to the discovery, he was taken with the newest idea, and was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration, I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in this, or whether Richard's was a solitary case.

Richard very often came to see us while we remained in London (though he soon failed in his letter writing), and with his quick abilities, his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better I knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted that he had been educated in no habits of application and concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks, always with fair credit, and often with distinction; but in a fitful, dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They were great qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously won; but, like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were very bad masters. If