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time; and when the light went out, when Dickens died, the entire English-speaking world felt it like a blow. On the streets foreigners remarked to one another that London was as depressed as though some great battle had been lost. His body was laid in Westminster Abbey, the Pantheon of England. Thousands streamed in, and a continual flood of flowers and wreaths poured over the simple burial place. Even to-day, fifty years later, one can seldom pass there without seeing a few flowers strewn by some grateful hand; his fame and his appeal have not wilted in all these years. To-day, as in that hour years ago when England pressed into the hand of this unsuspecting nobody the unhoped-for gift of a world-wide reputation, Charles Dickens still remains the most beloved, the most commanding and fêted story-teller of the entire English world. When a literary product has such an enormously powerful effect, extending equally in breadth and profundity, this can have resulted solely from the union of two forces customarily in conflict—from the identification of a man of genius with the traditions of his time. As a rule genius and the traditional react upon each other like fire and water. Indeed, it is almost the earmark of genius that it embodies coming traditions, antagonizing those of the past, and, as the author of a new race, declares war on the one which is on the decline. A genius and his times are like two worlds: they may interchange light and shadow, it is true, but they move in other spheres; their two orbits may touch, but they never unite. Here, then, is a rare moment in the heavens when the shadow of one planet so completes the brilliant side of the other that they merge into one. Dickens is the only great writer of the century whose deepest attitudes correspond completely with the spiritual needs of his time. His novels are absolutely identical with the England of the corresponding period; his work is the materialization of English traditions. Dickens is the humour of sixty million people across the Channel; he is their viewpoint, their morality, their aesthetics, their spiritual and artistic content, their particular sense of life which is sometimes foreign to us and at other times sympathetic in its yearnings. These works were not written by him, but by English tradition, which is the strongest, richest, most distinct tradition of all modern culture, and for this reason the most dangerous. Its vitality must not be underestimated. Every Englishman is more English than the German is German. When a man is English it is not simply as though a varnish or a colour were superimposed upon his spiritual organ-