In parts of some of his later books, especially _Little Dorrit_, _Great Expectations_, and _Our Mutual Friend_, Dickens at least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual ordinary modern life.

But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part, to material which could hardly be called romantic.

Both, therefore, in a manner, recalled the forces of fiction from the rather straggling and particularist courses which it had been pursuing for the last quarter of a century.
In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we have just been discussing, there may be seen--at their beginnings at least--something of that irresolution, uncertainty, and want of reliance on the powers of the novel, it-by-itself-it, which we have noticed before: and which the unerring craftsmanship of Scott had already pointed out in the "Conversation of the Author of _Waverley_ with Captain Clutterbuck" more than once referred to.

They want excuses and pretexts, bladders and spring-boards.

Even Dickens, despite his irrepressible self-reliance, burdens himself, at the beginning of _Pickwick_, with the clumsy old machinery of a club which he practically drops: and, still later, with the still more clumsy framework of "Master Humphrey's Clock" which he has not quietly to drop, but openly to strip off and cast away, before he has gone very far.