personages he created, and he ended by making his readers love them too. A precisely similar metamorphosis of character is perceptible in Pickwick. The hero is, in the opening chapter, little better than a fatuous old idiot, perpetually thrusting his nose into affairs which do not concern him; incessantly starting on the wildest of wild-goose chases; the butt of every wag; the easy dupe of every swindler. Jingle cheats him, Job Trotter laughs at him, Mrs. Bardell bubbles him, Dodson and Fogg play at battledore and shuttlecock with him, a schoolmistress locks him in a cupboard, he has scarcely strength of mind enough to resist the extortion of an impudent cabman. As to Sam Weller, when we are first introduced to him he is simply a low blackguard, and next door to what, in the present era, would be termed a rough.' He confesses that his early knowledge of the world has been gained-after he was turned out of doors by his father-by roaming about the streets and sleeping in the dry arches of Waterloo-bridge, or on the twopenny rope' in low lodging-houses. This is not even true to burlesque art, for the son of a well-to-do stage-coachman and licensed victualler should not have been reduced to such shifts. But, as the story progresses, all this changes. The doddering, prying, pottering old simpleton Pickwick grows to be a philanthropist of the kindest and noblest heart, the widest and tenderest sympathies. He is discriminating in his goodness, he is delicate in his benevolence. He is every inch a gentleman. Thus it is also with Sam Weller. The waif and stray of the London slums, the grimy drudge of the innyard in the Borough, develops into a servitor heroically devoted to his master, and capable -witness his voluntary incarceration in the Fleet, and his refusal to wed the pretty housemaid when his master is anxious to make him happy-of the noblest acts of self-sacrifice. It is the story of

Don Quixote and Sancho Pança over again; but with this single exception Cervantes was bound by no bond. He was independent from the beginning as to the conduct of his fable and the moulding of his characters' idiosyncrasies. Charles Dickens, on the contrary, began Pickwick in some kind of leading-strings. In the outset he was only engaged as a clever young man who could write to cuts' that is to say, who could furnish some amusing literary matter to accompany the etchings of Mr. Seymour. The artist was a caricaturist pure and simple. He had invented a diverting but impossible monster-the Cockney sportsman-a creature that never did and never could exist; and the machinery of the Club served only at first as a means of entangling a number of Cockney sportsmen in ludicrous adventures. Mr. Winkle was to be the real hero of Seymour's Cockney romance; and on him and the dolt Tupman, and the mere ass Snodgrass, the artist evidently meant to fasten all the comic mischances he could conceive.

The trammels which, in the early numbers of Pickwick, encom

passed the author, are manifest in the etching of the sportsman with his preternaturally wise dog, to elucidate which Dickens has been fain to paraphrase one of Jesse's 'anecdotes.' The cut, in fine done, and had to be written to. But no sooner had death removed poor Seymour, than the wielder of the pen shook himself free, at once and for ever, from the controlling influence of the pencil. The draughtsman was to be henceforth not his master, but his slave; and his early divorce from George Cruikshank (who only illustrated two of his works) may have been due to a half-unconscious impatience on his part of collaboration with another man of original genius (for George was undoubtedly, according to his lights, a creator); and Fagin, Bill Sikes, and Nancy had about them, pictorially, so strong a stamp of originality, that they had, to a certain extent, to be 'written up to.' In the good old days of folios and quartos, a harmless, nay, sometimes useful creature, called a scholiast, was permitted to encompass a great author's text with notes, commentaries, glosses, and marginalia. Sometimes these addenda fulfilled only the questionable purpose attained by an iron pot when it is tied to a dog's tail; but in many cases they really served to elucidate the author's meaning, to strengthen his arguments, and to draw attention to his beauties. The name of the scholiasts on Homer, Dante, Horace, Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope, are legion; nay, there are even variorum editions of Boswell's Johnson, and amply annotated issues of Pepys' Diary. It is a hundred years too soon, perhaps, for the scholiast on Dickens, in a literary sense, to make his appearance on the stage; and no gloss is yet needed to make us understand all the niceties of Sam Weller's slang, of his father's witticisms, or of Mr. Stiggins's cant. Yet in the interests of the study of the history of civilisation, it is well worth the while of the inquirer-leaving, for the nonce, the literary merits of the performance entirely on one side-to plod carefully through the pages of Pickwick, and mark the many and important changes which have taken place in our national manners since the book made its appearance, nearly five-and-thirty years ago. He who approached Vanity Fair in a similar spirit, and with an analogous intent, would lose his labour, or would be bitterly disappointed. The period in which the action of that drama of human life is laid ranges between 1815 and 1829; but the manners depicted belong almost exclusively to the time in which the book really made its appearance, 1845-6. In nearly the opening chapter Thackeray boldly threw overboard, in the etchings he himself appended to his text, every pretension of fidelity to the costumes of the epoch in which his personages moved. He proved to demonstration-by a little vignette copied from some fashion-plate of 1815-that to depict men and women in the dresses they really wore during the Regency and the reign of George IV. would be so outré, as to become offensive and

intolerable. Not avowedly, but still tacitly to completeness, he repudiated the manners, as he had repudiated the swallow-tails and short waists, of the Georgian era. His guardsmen, club-folk, flunkies, swindlers, toadies, school-girls, governesses, duchesses, and demireps, are all to their finger-tips of the Victorian age. These artistic solecisms are not existent in Pickwick. The author simply described that which he saw before him, literally, faithfully, and exactly; and he could have said with greater truth than Jean Jacques had on his side when he penned the epigraph to the Nouvelle Héloïse, J'ai vu les mœurs de mon temps, et j'ai publié ces lettres.' There could not, perhaps, be a more striking example of that which I have advanced than in the allusions to drunkenness in Pickwick, compared with that which we know to be the actual aspect of intemperance among us. We are a drunken people enough in 1870; but it is undeniable that the ruinous and degrading vice in question has been, to a very great extent, banished from respectable and refined society; while it is probable that among the chief causes of its decline in the higher classes have been the spread of the practice of cigar-smoking (which may seem a paradox, but is not one a drunken man cannot enjoy a cigar at all; and a sober one cannot appreciate any wine save thin claret while he is smoking); the universal use of soda-water and other aërated drinks; the surprising increase of foreign travel; and the amelioration in the social position of women, who are now permitted to share in many of the recreations of men from which a generation since they were senselessly and brutally debarred.

The two

There are some intoxicated characters in most of Dickens's novels; but Pickwick absolutely reeks with alcohol. Everybody gets drunk. The first club-night described is an orgie. The famous duel at Rochester arises from a violent debauch. Mr. Pickwick, his club-friends, Mr. Wardle, Mr. Stiggins, Mr. John Smauker and his fellow - flunkies, the stage-coachmen who rally round the elder Mr. Weller,―are all represented at various times in a state of more or less violent or stupid intoxication. Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Ben Allen are in a chronic state of delirium tremens, and all their associates of the medical-student class get as drunk as they. ghost-stories in the book are both connected with inebriety. Weller and his father drink deeply, but are only saved from making themselves ridiculous through the superior hardness of their heads. The Reverend Mr. Stiggins represents only so much detestable hypocrisy floating about in so much pine-apple rum-andwater. Mr. Job Trotter is in a continual state of vinous thirst. As for Mr. Pickwick, there is no end to his bibbing; and when he is tired while wandering about the City with Sam, he steps into the nearest public-house-in the middle of the day-and orders a glass of brandy-and-water hot. If an attorney's clerk be wanted, he is

fetched from the Magpie and Stump. If an affidavit has to be filed, the document cannot be executed without all the parties to it 'liquoring-up; and if a party of gentlemen sit down to a bottle or two' of wine at a coffee-house, the bottle or two' resolve themselves into a bottle or six.' It is extremely noticeable also, that not the slightest disgrace seems to attach to anybody for getting tipsy. In these days, a gentleman who takes too much wine-say at a Temple 'call-party,' or on the Derby-day-is more or less ashamed of himself the next morning; but when Mr. Pickwick, becoming intoxicated at a picnic, is found in a state of insensibility by Captain Boldwig and his gardener, and is put into a wheelbarrow and trundled to the village pound, where he recovers consciousness under the stimulus of rotten eggs and cabbage-stumps flung at him by the mob, he is only amicably chaffed' by his friends, and not the slightest shame appears to be felt by any party to the transaction. Thus also the madcap frolics of Mr. Sawyer and Mr. Allen in the post-chaise during their journey from Bristol to Birmingham-frolics which in our times would call for the interference of the police, and inspire the writers of sensational leaders in the penny papers to tremendous outbursts of virtuous indignation-are looked upon in Pickwick as thoroughly every-day occurrences; and equally as a matter of course does the author take the drunken episodes of the Eatanswill election, -an election which, in this pure and upright age, would lead to a grave judicial inquiry, and a blue-book as heavy as a cartload of bricks.

6

When I come to look at the costumes of the characters depicted in Pickwick, I find not change, but revolution. The hero himself, in his kerseymere smalls, shirt-frill, and black gaiters; Mr. Perker at ten o'clock in the morning in knee-breeches, silk stockings, and pumps; the elder Weller and any number of stage-coachmen rolling about the streets in top-boots, knee-cords, and broad-brimmed hats with low crowns; Messrs. Winkle and Snodgrass venturing into the streets arrayed in grass-green coats and cloaks with 'poodle collars,' -all these people fill me with amazement; but the amazement is diminished when I remember that revolutions in our national dress take place every decade; and that as great a change, perhaps, has taken place between the costume of this year and of ten years since, as between that of 1836 and 1870. It should be noted, however, that there is not a personage in Pickwick who wears a moustache, and that from the beginning to the end of the work not a single reference is made to the existence of such an institution as a Westend club, or to any house of entertainment (in London, at least) approaching what we should term nowadays a first-class hotel. Mr. Pickwick, a gentleman of considerable wealth and entire leisure, resides, in the outset, in mean lodgings in Goswell-street; and his landlady is the widow of an exciseman who lost his life by being knocked over the head with a quart-pot in a cellar. After Mr. Pick

wick leaves Mrs. Bardell's, he puts up' at the George and Vulture. In these days he would patronise the Langham or the CharingCross; or at least the Tavistock or the British. A maiden lady of independent means elopes in a post-chaise with a strolling player who was introduced to her at a review; and her abductor conveys her to an inn in the Borough, whence he repairs to Doctors' Commons for a license. With notice so brief as Mr. Jingle gave, he could no more in these days procure a marriage-license in Doctors' Commons, or anywhere else (without committing gross and wilful perjury), than he could procure a death-warrant to re-decapitate the late King Charles I.

To oldsters to those who remember the time, and know how faithfully the gifted chronicler has described it-Pickwick appears a perfectly natural and normal book. You, I, and our friend Fogey have a perfect recollection of the George and Vulture, the George and Blue Boar, the Black Bull, the Saracen's Head on Snow-hill, the Crown and Anchor, the Angel in the Strand, and the Thatched House in St. James's-street. To the present generation the names of those erst famous hostelries may appear as the vaguest and dimmest of shadows. We remember the Fleet Prison, and the Fair,' and the Painted Ground,' and the Poor-side.' What have those bygone dens of despair to do with the Ludgate terminus of the London Chatham and Dover Railway, and Messrs. Spiers and Pond's luncheon-bar? The old 'Bench,' the Marshalsea, the Insolvent Court in Portugal-street, the old Golden Cross at Charing, Lyons-inn, the Bath mail, the Hampstead stage, the yellow cabriolets with a perch for the driver at the side-are all to us definite and tangible entities. But what significance can they possess, what associations can they recall, to the schoolboy gloating his whole half-holiday through over Pickwick, or to the just-fledged lad from Oxford lounging in the library of the Senior Carlton? Well, Don Quixote reads with a like freshness to young and old, does it not? The Knight and his Squire live and breathe, and are deathless, although the book was written more than two hundred years ago. And Tom Jones? Does Squire Western's wig make him obsolete? Have Sophy's powder and hooppetticoat made her rococo? And the Journey to Brundusium; cannot we appreciate it, even in the midst of the roar and rattle of the Brighton express? There are people who-like the face of the Queen on the postage-stamps-never grow older. They are eternal; for they are the children of Genius; and it matters little if the Portrait of Mr. Pickwick were surmounted by a towering periwig, or encircled by an Elizabethan ruff, or draped in a Roman toga: it would still be one of those portraits which break Time's heart, and make Death gnaw his bony digits in despair.