appearance of the poor man-his patience, his contentment, his love for his wife and children, and for the innocent pleasures of his home! When will the world ever forget that Christmas dinner at Bob Cratchit's, where all the members took part in preparing it, where " Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy ready beforehand in a little saucepan hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigor; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and, mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped"? Even the most commonplace objects catch a brightness from Dickens as he passes by. A portrait he calls "the colored shadow of a man. The houses of London he represents as 66 peppered with smoke." A heavy door in an old rambling building is represented as "firing a long train of thundering reverberations." Copperfield's bed in the inn was 66 an immense fourposter, which was quite a little landed estate." The pockets of the Artful Dodger were so large that they seemed to undermine his whole suit of clothes. A certain dragoon was so tall that 'he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else." Trotty Veck's mittens had " a private apartment only for the thumb, and a common room or tap for the rest of the fingers.' Roger Riderhood had an old sodden fur cap, formless and mangy, and that looked like a furry animal, dog or cat, puppy or kitten, drowned and decaying.' See also how much he can make of an old mat: "Being useless as a mat, it had for many years directed its industry into another channel, and tripped up every one. And what a charm he throws around even his most insignificant characters! He has been accused of caricaturing them and making too much of them. what, after all, does this matter? This habit just arises from his love for the children of his brain, and his desire to make other people like them. In the outburst of his genial humor

66

he pulls them about, puts them into the most amusing attitude, and makes them appear under the most unexpected similitudes. Take a few examples. Some are remarkable for their appearance. We have-Dora's aunts, "not unlike birds altogether, having a sharp, brisk, sudden way of adjusting themselves like canaries; the apoplectic Major Bagstock, "with a complexion like a Stilton cheese, and eyes like a prawn's, and who not only rose in the morning like a giant refreshed, but conducted himself at breakfast like a giant refreshing ;" "the gawky fisher lad, Ham, whose trousers were so stiff that they could have stood alone, and who did not exactly wear a hat, but was covered in atop, like an old building, with something pitchy ;" Captain Cuttle, every inch a sailor, with a handkerchief twisted round his neck like a rope, a large shirt-collar like a small sail, and a glazed hat so hard that it made your very head ache to look at it; the old sailor in the lighthouse, "with his face as damaged and scarred with hard weather as the figure-head of an old ship, and who struck up a sturdy song that was like a gale;" a genuine tar by the name of Blogg," a weazen, old, crab-faced man, in a suit of battered oilskin, who had got tough and stringy from long pickling in salt water, and who smelled like a weedy sea-beach when the tide is out;" Bill Sykes, whose bulky legs always appeared "in an unfinished and incomplete state, without a set of fetters to garnish them;" a prize-fighter named the Game Chicken, "whose face bore the marks of having been frequently broken and but indifferently mended;" and shabby-genteel Tony Jobling, the rim of whose hat "had a glistening appearance as if it had been a favorite promenade for snails. Other characters are distinguishable by some peculiarity in their disposition. There is Pecksniff, the very ideal of a hypocrite, “like a direction post always pointing out the road to virtue and never going there himself." There is Miggs, a gaunt servant-of-all-work, who imagines that she is soaring to the very height of Christian charity when she exclaims, "I hopes I hates and despises both myself and all my fellow-creeturs." Then there is Joe Willet,

the stolid landlord of the Maypole, who can never think unless he is basking before a roaring fire, whose head, in fact, requires to be cooked before it will let out any ideas. There is also the immortal Micawber, threadbare, poverty-stricken, helplessly in debt; but alway great and glorious, when he describes his misery in grandiloquent words and long-resounding sen

tences.

When we think of the vast amount of innocent enjoyment which we ourselves have derived from Dickens' works; and when we multiply this amount by the millions of people who read these works in all parts of the world, we are lost in astonishment at the incalculable addition to the sum of human happiness which one man has been destined to make. His humor has, indeed, been one of the best tonics ever invented, and he himself one of the great benefactors of the human race.

Novels, in the third place, teach history. The novelist is really a historian of the motive and actions of men and of the manners of his own age. But he also sometimes goes back to by-gone ages, into the region of history proper; and this, in our opinion, he does legitimately. Partly from lack of materials, and partly from a deficiency in imaginative power, the historian proper, as a rule, has not been successful in making this region interesting to the general public. It is a misty, colorless, lifeless land. The student is very soon involved in endless tangles of political intrigues and military manœuvres. The great characters flit before him like ghosts, formless and silent; and there are no every-day people like himself in whom he can take an interest. Now, the historical novelist undertakes to remedy this defect. He sheds the light of his fancy on this dim land. He chooses the most striking of the political intrigues and manœuvres, and mingles them with tales of private life and adventure. He gives form and soul and color to the great men; and to make them more life-like, he associates with them a number of ordinary mortals, the creations of his own imagination. In fact, he imparts to the whole region, which was only a shadow before, an appearance of reality.