remarkable instance in Annie, Dr Strong's wife in Copperfield; poor Mercy Pecksniff follows the universal example; and even Louisa Gradgrind is not behind her predecessors. It would be worth while for any one curious in such matters to compare these little addresses-they are remarkable enough in their way: either the young lady deprecates interruption, or her interlocutor is perfectly silent, and hears her out, overpowered by her earnestness-and the speech is only broken by the author's description of those fluctuations of voice and colour which evidence the excitement of the speaker. This is quite a marked and noticeable feature in the writings of Mr Dickens.

In Chuzzlewit our author appears once more in force. There are pieces of "writing" here, descriptions of external life and landscape, so clearly, carefully, and elaborately painted, that the only thing we can find fault with is the want of some bit of haze or mistiness on which to exercise our imagination, some depth of shadow which we cannot see through, or solitary suggestive road leading nowhither, such as Nature herself always leaves for us in her charmed pictures. But a book which is supported by Tom Pinch and Mark Tapley, stands in little need of lesser props ;-if there should happen to be too much of the. stage-coach journey through the twilight and the night, there is not too much of the simple-hearted traveller, that uncouth, timid, self-forgetting, noble Tom. His simple allegiance to his tyrant—his equally simple horror and shame and grief when he finds what his tyrant really is-his flashes of courage, almost womanish, and full of sentiment-his pure and self-denying honour, his loving unworldly nature, are drawn with a tenderness and regard which secure our liking for Tom Pinch's author no less than for Tom Pinch. Perhaps Mr Dickens' claims as a humourist-a member of that brotherhood of authors who have contributed to the world such delicate and graceful creations as Uncle Toby and Sir Roger de Coverley - rest more upon this loving and tender picture than upon any other individual creation which he has yet produced. Tom's weaknesses and foibles-are we

left ignorant of one of them?-yet do we regard him a whit the less because we smile at these gentle faults of his? Mr Dickens has made sketches of more pretension, but he has never done anything so complete, so good, or of so graceful a perfection in his art, as the portrait of Tom Pinch.

Mark Tapley reminds us a good deal of Sam Weller-Sam born in the country, and with a shade of eccentricity added to his nature-yet Mark is not Sam, though he resembles him. The sketch of American life and manners, though far from flattering, is extremely clever, and looks true, and Mark goes through it with unfailing consistency-jolly where there is some credit in being so. The wonderful suppressed indignation of English Mark, his muttered thunder of "Britons never will be slaves" at sight of the man whom he tremulously announces to Martin as having been "a-a man and a brother, sir!" not being able to say that other word, slave, is very admirable,-one of those superlative touches of genius which never occur to common men. Martin, so long as he is selfish, keeps up his character very well; but when he becomes good, we lose him among the indefinite virtues common to heroesand Mary, his true love, never emerges from the vague beatitude of an orthodox heroine. The secondary_women of this book, however, are those on whom the author has put forth his strength. Mrs Gamp-who dares say a word against this horrid old woman?

how many merry boys and girls have corrupted their mother tongue after the example of her wonderful sentences; yet what a frightful picture she is, and how impossible we find it not to believe in her. In another style Mrs Lupin is a pretty sketch, and a very good one is Mrs Todgers. We are at a loss to account for the revolution which converts Mercy Pecksniff, a very heartless and selfish girl, into a model of wifely patience and heart-broken devotedness-a cruel and brutal husband does not always accomplish such a desirable result; but her sister is perfectly consistent throughout. Perhaps it is the mere perversity of human nature which hinders our due admiration of the much bepraised Ruth Pinch; we

cannot share her historian's admiration for this pretty little doll of his she is quite unworthy to be Tom Pinch's sister, and is by no means a genuine personage.

Next in succession comes what, in our judgment, is Mr Dickens' most able and most perfectly satisfactory work, David Copperfield. We heard Mr Thackeray commended lately by a judicious critic for the distinctness with which Clive Newcome grows in his present book, and the perfectly clear view we have of his progress from a boy to a man. The remark struck us as a very true and just oneand we apply the same praise to David Copperfield, a strangely dissimilar person, but one whose growth is quite as evident. This young man is one of those creations, so entirely yet so unostentatiously life-like, that the first impulse of the reader is to identify him with the author, and make a real autobiography out of the skilful fiction. All about himself is so quiet, and real, and free from exaggeration, that the simple critic hails the conclusion of the book, in which David appears as an author, as proof positive, and exults in this decisive evidence of his or her superior discernment. Beautifully commenced as it is, this book keeps up its pace more evenly than any of its predecessors; and, to our own liking, no other work of Mr Dickens can compete with this in completeness or in beauty. How sweet and touching is the first sketch of the young mother, with her little delicate boy, her faithful servant, and by-and-by her new lover! How we feel her faint young spirit sinking under the cruelty she is subjected to afterwards! And then the sorrows of that forlorn little boy; his toils, and trials, and premature acquaintance with life-nor life alone, but the Micawbers-matchless household! with their gentility, their hilarity, their despairs and triumphs. Who has not seen Mr Micawber himself-his business-like mode of settling his accounts-off-hand yet methodical —his bills of such-and-such a date— his cheerful confidence of something turning up! And who does not know the lady who bears his name-faded but always genteel-whose table is not a whit less agreeable, nor her talk

less dignified, because the serviceable Copperfield has just been making some little sale for her to provide the meal which she dispenses so placidly. How true is the precarious hand-tomouth existence of this characteristic family!-yet what pleasant kindly people, after all, are these nomades of civilisation! and how they talk! Then Miss Betsy Trotwood and her pretty country-house; what a sunbright picture it is-and how we feel the blissful security and rest of poor little David, tied up in the big shawl, listening to his aunt's anathemas of "that murdering sister;" and the Peggottys, male and female-and the adopted family of the rude seafaring hero and poor old dying Barkis "waiting for the tide." Mr Dickens must have been under benign influences when this beautiful dawn of history grew upon him. There is scarcely anything of it that we would willingly let die.

We pass over Steerforth-a not unusual example of the "conquering hero," and maker of misery-and his mother and cousin, who are quite unrecognisable people; but there is something wonderfully fine in the expedition of the heartbroken Peggotty-the wanderings of this noble and simple heart in search of his lost child-the light always in his cabinwindow at home in case she should venture hither, and he himself, holding up his love-torch over the dark sea of misery and guilt she had plunged into, looking for her. The Vicar of Wakefield himself does not carry our sympathies so much with him as poor Peggotty-and every member of this family is admirably drawn. Nor less excellent is the guileless young romance of David-the falling in love

and, to cheer us after poor Emily's tragedy, pretty little Dora comes dancing on the scene. Poor sweet little fool! Nobody yet but Mr Dickens has ventured on such a heroine; and it is very wise of our author that he attempts to make nothing further of her than a child-wife and a remembrance. We cease to be impatient with Dora when we see how soon she is to die.

We are glad to linger upon the many beauties of this tale. Tradles, too-what an admirable fellow he is!

and his rarely-contrived chambers, after he is so happy as to get married, with room for how many wife's sisters; and his horror when some one, possibly a client, interrupts his enjoyment of the society which is "very pleasant, but decidedly not professional; " and his delight to find that the intruder is only the friendly schoolfellow to whom he confided his loves before" the dearest girl in the world" was with him in the Temple. How pleasant they all are! and how we regret that little marble table inhumanly sacrificed by the creditors of the Micawbers. There is nothing amiss with him but his name-where does Mr Dickens find these names?

But Mr Dickens' villains, if truth must be told, are always detestable. A meaner reptile than Uriah Heapa more abominable nuisance than Pecksniff, never existed in fiction. We have no pleasure in seeing them foiled, and their machinations exposed to universal indignation, because at all times they are insufferable; and we resent every appearance they make, even when they appear only to be discomfited. How very rare it is to meet with a good villain! We have some very clever rascals in our modern literature, but we know not the author whose powers are fully equal to this greater achievement. Perhaps Gammon, in Ten Thousand a-Year, is about the best modern example; but Mr Dickens' disgusting rogues are entirely out of the category, and have no right to any better treatment than to be run down and exterminated in the quickest and most summary way.

And there is again much fine description, much very careful "writing," in the history of David Copperfield. The storm in which Steerforth perishes is very powerfully done; and Peggotty's strange home on Yarmouth sands, with the ebbing and the rising tides for its nearest neighbours, leaves a most distinct impression upon the imagination. We do not quite know why Dr Strong and his young muchtried wife have their little episode interposed in a story which is sufficiently full without, and has in reality no need of them; but it would be hard to deny the author, who has done so much for our gratification, a little capriccio on his own account.

In Mr Dickens' last great work (an adjective which cannot apply in any sense to his very last one, Hard Times), he makes a beginning as pleasant as in Copperfield; but great as are the merits of Bleak House, we cannot be persuaded into the same thorough liking for it as we entertain for its predecessor. Here we are again on the perilous standing-ground of social evil; and the sketch of workhouse tyranny in Oliver Twist, and the miserable picture of the miserable school in Nickleby, are transcended by this last exposition of a still wider and more extensive desolation. Had the lesson been unlearned, or the truth less universally known, this must have been a very telling revelation of the longacknowledged evils of Chancery litigation; and even admitting that Mr Dickens comes late into the field, it is not to be denied that, for the purposes of his story, he makes very effective use of his suit in Chancery. Not to speak of Miss Flite and Gridley, the earlier victims, who are introduced rather to support the argument than to help the narrative, the manner in which the fatal Jarndyce case engulfs and swallows up poor Richard Carstone is at once extremely well managed, and a quite legitimate use of a public evil. Poor Richard! his flightiness and youthfulness, his enthusiasm and discontent, and that famous and most characteristic argument of his, by which he proves that, in not making some extravagant purchase he meditated, he has saved so much, and has consequently such a sum additional to spend, are very true-sadly true, and to the life. Poor Ada is a sweet slight sketch, not aiming at very much, but Mr Dickens has been ambitious in Esther. Esther begins very well, but, alas! falls off sadly as she goes on. In her extreme unconsciousness Esther is too conscious by half: we see her going about, rattling herbasket of keys, and simpering with a wearisome sweetness. Yes, we are grieved to say it; but it is with a simper that Miss Esther Summerson recalls those loving and applauding speeches which she is so sweetly surprised that everybody should make to her. We are sometimes reminded of the diary of Miss Fanny Burney in reading that of Esther; each of these ladies

exhibits a degree of delightful innocence and confusion in recording the compliments paid to them, which it is edifying to behold. But Esther, though her historian does great things for her, is not so clever as Fanny; and as there is no affectation so disagreeable as the affectation of ingenuous simplicity, we feel considerably tired of Esther before she comes to an end. Nevertheless we must make a protest in behalf of this young lady, little as she interests us: we cannot be content with this style of unceremonious transfer from one suitor to another, which so many modern heroines are subjected to. This, which is becoming quite a favourite arrangement in fiction, especially patronised, to increase the wonder, by lady novelists, does not seem to us to be particularly flattering even to the bridegroom, promoted at the eleventh hour to the post of honour; but how much less flattering to the bride, thus quietly disposed of, let the first heroine of spirit, threatened with such an insult, declare indignantly, by casting adrift both the wooers, who barter her between them. Perhaps Esther deserves the indignity, and she certainly does not seem to resent it; but before she loses or gives up all the honours accorded to her sex, we must make our stand in behalf of the unfortunate piece of perfection called a heroine. Take our novels as a criterion, and how much of the love-making of the present day is done by the ladies? Oh age of chivalry! oh knightly worshippers of beauty, throned and unapproachable! What has become of all the reverence and duty of your magnanimous bestowal, the sacred honours you gave to woman's weakness, and all the noble fruits it bore?

We are somewhat at a loss to find why so many pseudo-philanthropists come in to the first stage of this tale, for it does not seem enough reason for their introduction that they are simply to play upon the benevolence of Mr Jarndyce, and thence to disappear into their native gloom. Altogether the author seems to have intended making more of Jarndyce, and his immediate surroundings, in his first design-else why the momentary vision of Mrs Pardiggle, and the elaborate sketch of Boythorne, of whom so very little is

made afterwards? Mrs Jellyby, too, disappears placidly, though she leaves a very sufficient representative in her daughter, whose various adventures and simple girlish character make a pleasant variety in the tale. Then there is Skimpole, a sketch, which looks almost too near the life, of the fashionable amiable phase of the most entire and unalloyed selfishness. The poor boy Joe is a very effective picture, though we fail to discover a sufficient reason for his introduction; and the household of Snagsby, in spite of the clandestine virtues of its good little master, is far from an agreeable one. We cannot omit, either, to remark the horrible catastrophe of the book, a pure outrage upon imagination. It is not of the slightest importance to us if a case of spontaneous combustion occurs somewhere every week or every day, but we know it is quite out of the range of healthful and sound invention, a monstrous and fantastic horror;

worthy of it, and of their relationship to its victim, are the revolting family of Small weeds. Is this humour? or is it worthy to be offered to a trustful public in any guise? Yet many of these pages, which Mr Dickens can fill so well, are given over to disgust and impatience, that our author may bring before us this miserable family, and prove to us what he can do in the way of exaggerated and uninstructive caricature. We have another quarrel with Mr Dickensone of long standing, dating back to the period of his first work the "shepherd" of Mr Weller's widow, the little Bethel of Mrs Nubbles, have effloresced in Bleak House into a detestable Mr Chadband, an oft-repeated libel upon the preachers of the poor. This is a very vulgar and common piece of slander, quite unworthy of a true artist. Are we really to believe, then, that only those who are moderately religious are true in their profession?—that it is good to be in earnest in every occupation but one, the most important of all, as it happens? What a miserable assumption is this! Mr Dickens' tender charity does not disdain to embrace a good many equivocal people-why then so persevering an aim at a class which offends few and harms no man? Not very long since,

we ourselves, who are no great admirers of English dissent, happened to go into a very humble little meeting-house-perhaps a Bethel-where the preacher, at his beginning, we are ashamed to say, tempted our unaccustomed faculties almost to laughter. Here was quite an opportunity for finding a Chadband, for the little man was round and ruddy, and had a shining face his grammar was not perfect, moreover, and having occasion to mention a certain Scripture town, he called it Canar of Galilee; but when we had listened for half an hour, we had no longer the slightest inclination to laugh at the humble preacher. This unpretending man reached to the heart of his subject in less time than we have taken to tell of it; gave a bright, clear, individual view of the doctrine he was considering, and urged it on his hearers with homely arguments which were as little ridiculous as can be supposed. Will Mr Dickens permit us to advise him, when he next would draw a "shepherd," to study his figure from the life? Let him choose the least little chapel on his way, and take his chance for a successful sitting: we grant him he may find a Chadband, but we promise him he has at least an equal chance of finding an apostle instead.

We are glad to turn from those disagreeable people to the lofty household which adds its state and grandeur to this novel, and we can give nothing but commendation, and that of the highest, to the family of Sir Leicester Dedlock. Lady Dedlock, haughty, imperious, beautiful, elevated to a higher world, above suspicion, like the wife of Cæsar, by the reverential admiration of her husband, is admirably introduced; and the woman's heart weeping behind these disguises the old secret history so slowly unfolded, the womanish impulses so sudden and stormy, the womanish horror and yet defiance of shame, are nobly developed as the tale goes on. How did her ladyship's daughter chance to have so mild and tame a nature? The fire and passion of Lady Dedlock are things of a very different rank and order from any emotion of Esther Summerson's. The whole house, from the grey-haired

pompous ancient gentleman himself— a true gentleman, and tenderly revealed to us, in the end, with the old chivalry alive and noble under these grand pretences of his-down to the debilitated cousin, is worthy of its author. In this sphere he has done nothing so dignified and so perfect. The accessories and dependants of the family are all touched with equal delicacy. What can be better in its way than George, his friends, and his story?-or that stout-hearted trooper's wife, with her far-travelled umbrella and her grey cloak?

In the very highly wrought and tragical pursuit of Lady Dedlock, Mr Dickens makes use of materials long since collected. Strangely different in its superficial garb from the romance of the past is the romance of to-day; yet who ever traced a picturesque fugitive, warned by spectres, and pressed by armed pursuers, with interest more breathless and absorbed than that with which we follow Bucket as he follows the faint trace of this unhappy lady? The dash of the horses along the midnight road— the breathless and silent excitement to which the pursuers reach at last, and then the sudden discovery and climax so simply told, form a wonderful picture. And most pathetic is that other scene, where poor Sir Leicester lies in his chamber, listening for their return. These scenes are full of delicacy and power, and are very great efforts, conceived and carried out with unfaltering force.

It is very ungrateful, after all this, and acknowledging to the full how excellently this portion of Bleak House is accomplished, to yield to the temptation given us in the conclusion, and suffer our dissatisfaction with that to overshadow the book with all its admirable qualities; but we are obliged to say that we think Esther a failure, and, when she has only herself to talk about, are glad to be done with the complaisant history. Mr Dickens is evidently ambitious of achieving a heroine-witness his vehement endeavour to make something of Ruth Pinch, his careful elaboration of Dolly Varden, and even the pains he has taken with Dora. It is a laudable ambition, for heroines are a sadly featureless class of well-intentioned young