as “Pickwick,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “David Copperfield,” or even “Bleak House.”  We never can have any Mr. Micawber but Phiz’s indescribably jaunty Micawber.  His Mr. Pecksniff is not very like a human being, but his collars and his eye-glass redeem him, and after all Pecksniff is a transcendental and incredible Tartuffe.  Tom Pinch is even less sympathetic in the drawings than in the novel.  Jonas Chuzzlewit is also “too steep,” as a modern critic has said in modern slang.  But in the novel, too, Mr. Jonas is somewhat precipitous.  Nicholas Nickleby is a colourless sort of young man in the illustrations, but then he is not very vividly presented in the text.  Ralph Nickleby and Arthur Gride may pair off with Jonas Chuzzlewit, but who can disparage the immortal Mr. Squeers?  From the first moment when we see him at his inn, with the starveling little boys, through all the story, Mr. Squeers is consistently exquisite.  In spite of his cruelty, coarseness, hypocrisy, there is a kind of humour in Mr. Squeers which makes him not quite detestable.  In “David Copperfield” Mr. Micawber is perhaps the only artistic creation of much permanent merit, unless it be the waiter who consumed David’s dinner, and the landlady who gave him a pint of the Regular Stunning.  In “Bleak House” Mr. Browne made some credible attempts to be tragic and pathetic.  Jo is remembered, and the gateway of the churchyard where the rats were, and the Ghost’s Walk in the gloomy domain of Lady Dedlock.

It is a singular and gloomy feature in the character of young ladies and gentlemen of a particular type that they have ceased to care for Dickens, as they have ceased to care for Scott.  They say they cannot read Dickens.  When Mr. Pickwick’s adventures are presented to the modern maid, she behaves like the Cambridge freshman.  “Euclide viso, cohorruit et evasit.”  When he was shown Euclid he evinced dismay, and sneaked off.  Even so do most young people act when they are expected to read “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Martin Chuzzlewit.”  They call these masterpieces “too gutterly gutter;” they cannot sympathize with this honest humour and conscious pathos.  Consequently the innumerable references to Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Mr. Pecksniff, and Mr. Winkle which fill our ephemeral literature are written for these persons in an unknown tongue.  The number of people who could take a good pass in Mr. Calverley’s Pickwick Examination Paper is said to be diminishing.  Pathetic questions are sometimes put.  Are we not too much cultivated?  Can this fastidiousness be anything but a casual passing phase of taste?  Are all people over thirty who cling to their Dickens and their Scott old fogies?  Are we wrong in preferring them to “Bootle’s Baby,” and “The Quick or the Dead,” and the novels of M. Paul Bourget?

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROPOSALS.