hauteur with which they were wont to bear down upon the writers and thinkers of the new. Some of the ablest English scholars, on the contrary, express a preference to publish originally in American periodicals. Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, are the leaders of the select band who have signed the declaration of intellectual independence, and are raising the nation above the 'rustic murmur' of provincial life into the great wave that echoes round the world.'

Two important characteristics of the day merit emphasis. One is the activity and universality of scientific influence. The idea of law has been so extended and generalized as to dwarf its former proportions. It is diffused throughout the mental atmosphere, and powerfully affects every department of thought. Again, literature, English and American, is distinguished by a profounder moral consciousness than ever before, a greater delicacy of analysis, a deeper ground of sentiment and reflection. High and low run the race of accumulation, but human interest circles with growing appreciation about the moral man,- his origin, his possibilities, his aspirations, his destiny.

DICKENS.

We doubt whether there has ever been a writer of fiction who took such a real and loving interest in the world about him.-Sir Arthur Helps.

Biography.-Born at Landport, in 1812, second in a family of eight; at two, was brought to London, but soon removed to Chatham, where he lived till the age of nine. Here, debarred from boyish sports by a delicate constitution, he sought the companionship of books:

'My father had left a small collection of books in a little room up-stairs to which I had access, and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, "Roderick Random," "Peregrine Pickle," ""Humphrey Clinker," "Tom Jones," "Vicar of Wakefield," "Don Quixote," "Gil Blas," and "Robinson Crusoe," came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time.'1

From Chatham back to London, where his father was imprisoned for debt. By degrees the furniture was sold or pawned, the

1 David Copperfield.

library with the rest; and the boy, weakly and sensitive, was put to work in a blacking-house at six or seven shillings a week, his occupation being to cover the blacking-pots with paper. He has described his sense of degradation, which grew larger and more ghastly in the retrospect:

'No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship: compared these every-day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more, cannot be written.'

The family resources improving, he was sent to school, where 'the boys trained white mice much better than the master trained the boys'; at fifteen, an office-lad to attorneys, then a student of short-hand, frequenting the British Museum and reading diligently. 'Pray, Mr. Dickens,' said a friend to the father, 'where was your son educated?' 'Why, indeed, sir-ha, ha ! — he may be said to have educated himself.' In a similar strain, Weller in Pickwick speaks of his hopeful Sam: 'I took a good deal o' pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was wery young, and shift for his-self.' At nineteen, in the Gallery of the House of Commons, where he was quickly acknowledged the best of eighty or ninety reporters. Three years later, having ventured one evening to drop a story into the letter-box of the Old Monthly Magazine, he saw himself in print. On which occasion I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.' Other sketches followed, signed 'Boz'; and in 1836 these were collected into two volumes,—his first work, the copyright of which was sold for one hundred and fifty pounds, and shortly repurchased for two thousand pounds! On the thirtyfirst of March he began the Pickwick Papers; on the second of April, married; in August, quit the Reporter's Gallery, and entered literature as a profession. Travelled in the Highlands, visited Switzerland and the United States, resided in Italy and France, engaged in public readings from his novels, and in this way alone gained forty thousand pounds in Britain and America. Health declined, but love of money and love of applause urged

him on, till at last he was stricken with apoplexy, and died in a state of unconsciousness on the evening of the ninth of June, 1870. Though he had desired to be laid quietly in the old church-yard amidst the scenes that were dear to memory, the national cemetery claimed him, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Writings. It was the mission of Dickens as an artist to give a masterly realism to the good and ill of every-day life. Oliver Twist is the story of a child born in a workhouse and brought up by the parish, thrown amid scenes of vice, wretchedness, and misery, yet preserved from pollution by an exquisite delicacy and strength of natural sentiment. Call it a series of pictures, portraits of associates in crime, who forever skulk uneasily, with the ghastly gallows closing up their prospect. Here is the ruffian Sykes, who has horribly murdered a trusted girl that betrayed him:

The sunthe bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man-burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly colored glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice it shed its equal ray. It lighted up the room where the murdered woman lay. It did. He tried to shut it out, but it would stream in. If the sight had been a ghastly one in the dull morning, what was it now, in all that brilliant light!

He had not moved; he had been afraid to stir. There had been a moan and motion of the hand; and, with terror added to rage, he had struck and struck again. Once he threw a rug over it: but it was to fancy the eyes, and imagine them moving toward him, then to see them glaring upward, as if watching the reflection of the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling. He had plucked it off again. And there was the body-mere flesh and blood, no more - but such flesh, and so much blood! He struck a light, kindled a fire, and thrust the club into it. There was hair upon the end, which blazed and shrunk into a light cinder, and, caught by the air, whirled up the chimney. Even that frightened him, sturdy as he was; but he held the weapon till it broke, and then piled it on the coals to burn away, and smoulder into ashes. He washed himself, and rubbed his clothes: there were spots that would not be removed, but he cut the pieces out, and burnt them. How those stains were dispersed about the room!'

In vain he flies, hither and thither, from memory and himself. The very children seem to view him with suspicion. Waking or sleeping, the dreadful vision is before him,—the room with its familiar contents, each well-known object in its accustomed place; above all, the widely staring eyes, so lustreless and so glassy:

'He went on doggedly; but as he left the town behind him, and plunged into the solitude and darkness of the road, he felt a dread and awe creeping upon him which shook him to the core. Every object before him, substance or shadow, still or moving, took the semblance of some fearful thing; but these fears were nothing compared to the sense that haunted him of that morning's ghastly figure following at his heels. He could trace its shadow in the gloom, supply the smallest item of the outline, and note how stiff and solemn it seemed to stalk along. He could hear its garments rustling in the leaves;

and every breath of wind came laden with that last low cry. If he stopped, it did the same. If he ran, it followed-not running too; that would have been a relief; but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and borne on the slow melancholy wind that never rose or fell.

At times, he turned, with desperate determination, resolved to beat this phantom off, though it should look him dead; but the hair rose on his head, and his blood stood still: for it had turned with him and was behind him then. He had kept it before him that morning, but it was behind him now-always. He leaned his back against a bank, and felt that it stood above him, visibly out against the cold night-sky. He threw himself upon the road-on his back upon the road. At his head it stood, silent, erect, and still — a living gravestone, with its epitaph in blood.'

Since Shakespeare there has been no such depicture-so lucid and so powerful. Fagin, the abhorred Jew, overwhelmed by a sense of the grave that opens at his feet, has heard mechanically, like a marble figure, the sentence that dooms him to die, and, hurried to one of the condemned cells, is left alone:

'He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for seat and bedstead; and casting his bloodshot eyes upon the ground, tried to collect his thoughts. After a while he began to remember a few disjointed fragments of what the judge had said: though it had seemed to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word. These gradually fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more; so that in a little time he had the whole, almost as it was delivered. To be hanged by the neck, till he was dead-that was the end. To be hanged by the neck till he was dead.

As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had known who had died upon the scaffold, some of them through his means. They rose up, in such quick succession that he could hardly count them. He had seen some of them die,- and had joked too, because they died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop went down; and how suddenly they changed, from strong and vigorous' men to dangling heaps of clothes!

Some of them might have inhabited that very cell-sat upon that very spot. It was very dark; why didn't they bring a light? The cell had been built for many years. Scores of men must have passed their last hours there. It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead bodies. -the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew, even beneath that hideous veil - Light, light!'

In The Old Curiosity Shop we have the like wealth and fulness of individual oddities and striking contrasts. Dick Swiveller is worthy of a high place in English comedy. He is a good-natured vagabond, a clever compound of conceit and assurance. He purchases, notoriously without means to pay, promising with dignified carelessness to call and settle when he should be passing presently.' To spare himself unnecessary annoyance, he makes a memorandum of the locality:

'I enter in this little book the names of the streets that I can't go down while the shops are open. This dinner to-day closes Long Acre. I bought a pair of boots in Great Queen Street, and made that no thoroughfare too. There's only one avenue in the Strand left open now, and I shall have to stop up that to-night with a pair of gloves. The roads are closing so fast in every direction, that in about a month's time, unless my aunt sends me a remittance, I shall have to go three or four miles out of town to get over the way.'

His head is stored with scraps of songs and plays, ready for the sentiment of the moment. Jilted, as he thinks, by Miss Wackles, he takes leave of her in the following style:

'My boat is on the shore and my bark is on the sea, but before I pass this door I will say farewell to thee. . . . I believed you true, and I was blest in so believing, but now I mourn that e'er I knew a girl so fair yet so deceiving. . . . I came here . . . with my. bosom expanded, my heart dilated, and my sentiments of a corresponding description. I go away with feelings that may be conceived but cannot be described; feeling within myself the desolating truth that my best affections have experienced, this night, a stifler! I wish you a very good night; concluding with this slight remark, that there is a young lady growing up at this present moment for me, who has not only great personal attractions, but great wealth, and who has requested her next of kin to propose for my hand, which having a regard for some members of her family, I have consented to promise. It's a gratifying circumstance which you'll be glad to hear, that a young and lovely girl is growing into a woman expressly on my account, and is now saving up for me. I thought I'd mention it. I have now merely to apologise for trespassing so long upon your attention. Good night!'

In the pangs of disappointed love, he exhibits to Quilp, the wolfish dwarf, a piece of the indigestible wedding-cake:

"What should you say this was?" demanded Mr. Swiveller.

"It looks like bride-cake," replied the dwarf, grinning.

"And whose should you say it was?" inquired Mr. Swiveller, rubbing the pastry against his nose with a dreadful calmness.

"Not-"

"Whose?"

"Yes," said Dick, "the same. You needn't mention her name. There's no such name now. Her name is Cheggs, now, Sophy Cheggs. Yet loved I as man never loved that hadn't wooden legs, and my heart, my heart is breaking for the love of Sophy Cheggs."

In his own bed-chamber, having divested himself of one boot and forgotten the other, he falls into deep cogitation:

"These rubbers," said Mr. Swiveller, putting on his night-cap in exactly the same style as he wore his hat, "remind me of the matrimonial fireside. . . . By this time, I should say," added Richard, getting his left cheek into profile, and looking complacently at the reflection of a very little scrap of whisker in the looking-glass; "by this time, I should say, the iron has entered into her soul. It serves her right!"'

With a vast opinion of his own abilities, he is the victim of every knave he encounters. His life is a series of failures and defeats, but all his woes are beguiled with this cheerful philosophy:

"No money; no credit; . . . notice to quit the old lodgings-staggerers, three, four, five, and six! Under an accumulation of staggerers, no man can be considered a free agent. No man knocks himself down; if his destiny knocks him down, his destiny must pick him up again. Then I'm very glad that mine has brought all this upon itself, and I shall be as careless as I can, and make myself quite at home to spite it. So go on, my buck," said Mr. Swiveller, taking his leave of the ceiling with a significant nod, "and let us see which of us will be tired first!"

In contrast with these grotesque and reckless characters is the trusting and loving little Nell, a frail and charming child, with a sad maturity of experience, much-wandering, much-suffering, yet