With what a power of delineation have the abuses of his institutions been portrayed!  How have the poor-house, the jail, the police courts of justice, passed before his magic mirror, and displayed to us the petty tyranny of the low-minded official, from the magnificent Mr. Bumble, and the hard-hearted Mr. Roker, to the authoritative Justice Fang, the positive Judge Starleigh!  And as we contemplate them, how strongly have we realized the time-worn evils of some of the systems they revealed to our eyesight, sharpened to detect the deficiencies and malpractices under our own.

The genius of chivalry, which had walked with such power among men, was exorcised by the pen of Cervantes.  He did but clothe it with the name and images of Don Quixote de la Mancha and his faithful Squire, and ridicule destroyed what argument could not reach.

This power belongs in an eminent degree to some of the personifications of our guest.  A short time ago it was discovered that a petty tyrant had abused the children who had been committed to his care.  No long and elaborate discussion was needed to arouse the public mind.  He was pronounced a perfect Squeers, and eloquence could go no further.  Happy is he who can add a pleasure to the hours of childhood, but far happier he who, by fixing the attention of the world on their secret sufferings, can protect or deliver them from their power.

But it is not only as a portrayer of public wrongs that we are indebted to our friend.  What reflecting mind can contemplate some of those characters without being made more kind-hearted and charitable?  Descend with him into the very sink of vice—­contemplate the mistress of a robber—­the victim of a murderer—­disgraced without—­polluted within—­and yet when, in better moments, her natural kindness breaks through the cloud, then she tells you that no word of counsel, no tone of moral teaching, ever fell upon her ear.  When she looks forward from a life of misery to a death by suicide, you cannot but feel that there is no condition so degraded as not to be visited by gleams of a higher nature, and rejoice that He alone will judge the sin who knows also the temptation.  Again, how strongly are the happiness of virtue and the misery of vice contrasted.  The morning scene of Sir Mulberry Hawk and his pupil brings out in strong relief the night scene of Kit Nubbles and his mother.  The one in affluence and splendor, trying to find an easier position for his aching head, surrounded with means and trophies of debauchery, and thinking “there would be nothing so snug and comfortable as to die at once.”  The other in the poorest room, earning a precarious subsistence by her labors at the wash-tub—­ugly, and ignorant, and vulgar, surrounded by poverty, with one child in the cradle, and the other in the clothes-basket, “whose great round eyes emphatically declared that he never meant to go to sleep any more, and thus opened a cheerful prospect to his relations and friends”—­and