The great Dickens characters

I had expected that Chesterton would discuss various examples of Dickens' characters, but instead he takes a more general view of Dickens' creations. Charles Dickens, as well as Sir Walter Scott, are the great democratic writers of the nineteenth century, but they manifest this in opposite ways:

There are two things in which all men are manifestly unmistakably equal. They are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual  certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it.

Dickens' great characters are usually common people; he finds inexhaustible opportunities in 'the liberty and variety of man'. 'It is the utterly unknown people, who can grow in all directions like an exuberant tree'. They may be fools, but they are 'great fools'.