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ly woven out of the applause, the unmitigated successes, and his proud consciousness of artistic power, held him fast to the English soil; finally he capitulated, inwardly pledged to the aesthetic and moral laws of his country. He fell wholly under the domination of English tradition, of bourgeois tastes; he was another Gulliver among the Lilliputians. His remarkable imagination, which could have soared like an eagle above this narrow world, was caught in the shackles of his success. His impulse as an artist is oppressed by the soundness of his satisfaction. Dickens was content; content with the world, with England, with those about him, and with himself. England was contented with him, and he was contented with England. There was none of that angry love in him which strives to castigate, to uproot, to spur on, to make more worthy; he lacked that primary urge of the artist to reckon with God, to discard this world and fashion it anew after his own ideas. Dickens was pious, and reverent; the established order of things filled him with a warm admiration, an incurably childish unthinking delight. He was content. He did not ask for much. As a child he had been poor, forgotten of fate, bullied by the world about him; his youth had been frittered away with wretched jobs. His yearnings of that time had been powerful and varied, but he had persistently been intimidated and forced back into his corner. That was smouldering in him. Childhood was an essentially poetic and tragic experience—here the total of his creativeness had been sunk into the fertile soil of silent pain. And, when he had attained the full use of his powers, it was his deepest ambition to avenge this childhood of his. He wanted his novels to aid all the poor, forgotten, abandoned children who—as he had once done—were suffering at the hands of bad teachers, neglected schools, indifferent parents; suffering from people's customary selfish unconcern and lovelessness. He wished to save for children those few coloured blossoms of pleasure which had wilted in his own breast since the dew of kindness had been denied them. In late life everything had been granted him; but his childhood cried for revenge. And his sole moral intention, the ultimate impetus of his poetry, was the helping of these weaklings—on this score he wished to ameliorate contemporary ways of life. He did not rebel; he did not rise up to oppose the standards of the state; he did not threaten; he did not shake an angry fist in the face of his people, against the legislators, against the bourgeois,