quality can be placed beside the masterpieces in that kind of Lamb, or Sterne, or Goldsmith, or Washington Irving.  Granted freely; not humour of that special character.  But very good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce—­the humour that finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes dulness amusing.  How thoroughly wholesome it is too!  To be at the same time merry and wise, says the old adage, is a hard combination.  Dickens was both.  With all his boisterous merriment, his volleys of inextinguishable laughter, he never makes game of what is at all worthy of respect.  Here, as in his later books, right is right, and wrong wrong, and he is never tempted to jingle his jester’s bell out of season, and make right look ridiculous.  And if the humour of “Pickwick” be wholesome, it is also most genial and kindly.  We have here no acrid cynic sneeringly pointing out the plague spots of humanity, and showing pleasantly how even the good are tainted with evil.  Rather does Dickens delight in finding some touch of goodness, some lingering memory of better things, some hopeful aspiration, some trace of unselfish devotion in characters where all seems soddened and lost.  In brief, the laughter is the laughter of one who sees the foibles, and even the vices of his fellow-men, and yet looks on them lovingly and helpfully.

So much the first readers of “Pickwick” might note as the book unfolded itself to them, part by part; and they might also note one or two things besides.  They might note—­they could scarcely fail to do so—­that though there was a touch of caricature in nearly all the characters, yet those characters were, one and all, wonderfully real, and very much alive.  It was no world of shadows to which the author introduced them.  Mr. Pickwick had a very distinct existence, and so had his three friends, and Bob Sawyer, and Benjamin Allen, and Mr. Jingle, and Tony Weller, and all the swarm of minor characters.  While as to Sam Weller, if it be really true that he averted impending ruin from the book, and turned defeat into victory, one can only say that it was like him.  When did he ever “stint stroke” in “foughten field”?  By what array of adverse circumstances was he ever taken at a disadvantage?  To have created a character of this vitality, of this individual force, would be a feather in the cap of any novelist who ever lived.  Something I think of Dickens’ own blood passed into this special progeniture of his.  It has been irreverently said that Falstaff might represent Shakespeare in his cups, just as Hamlet might represent him in his more sober moments.  So I have always had a kind of fancy that Sam Weller might be regarded as Dickens himself seen in a certain aspect—­a sort of Dickens, shall I say?—­in an humbler sphere of life, and who had never devoted himself to literature.  There is in both the same