brushed by us in the dark. They are persons, in the strictest sense; and there are so many of them! Even those, which play the most subordinate parts, the mere supernumeraries to complete a group, whom we almost overlook while occupied with the central figures, come up again in memory with the rest, each with his own unique expression. No one of them is so eccentric, so flattened or elongated in description by the humoristic mood of the writer, that we do not recollect the like of him somewhere. And yet are they, all, beings by themselves; they are all creations; they were not, and never could have been, merely copied. A copy, to have life, must also be an original in some sense. We do not wonder that Cruikshank's sketches are in general so apt: how could the artist fail to take the idea of characters, which came from the writer's mind in form too individual and palpable to be mistaken? If in any class of characters he fails, it is in those of sentiment and higher culture. There is most life in his knaves, his drolls, his vulgar officials, and eccentric folks. But his gentlemen and ladies are almost characterless. Rose Maylie and her lover, though they relieve the lowering, lurid monotony of a tale of so much guilt with a little sunlight, yet are, it must be confessed, rather tame in themselves. This part of the book would never be read for its own sake. Their images do not present themselves before us in our vacant hours; while the Beadle, the whole-hearted doctor, good Mr. Brownlow, and his crusty old crony, Mr. Grimwig, with his worst side out, and the whole group of the Jew and his associates, are portraits hung up in a very strong light in the chambers of our memory, which we look at daily as we pass.

Scenes and places, too, are brought before us with the same distinctness. We shall not forget to seek out those decayed old tenements, when we go to London. And should we ever chance to pass upon a stage-coach through the village of Oliver's birth, we shall recognise it at a glance, and think how Mr. Bumble here disported in the glory of full-blown beadleship; alas! the uncertain tenure of human greatness!

A man of so mnch observation must of course have an eye for the ludicrous. Of the humor of "Boz," we cannot trust ourselves to say the fitting word. It seems to be the natural posture of his mind. All his thoughts flow out in humor. his portraits are steeped in it. Over all his descriptions hovers this quaint presiding genius;—it waits outside, not far aloof,

All

when the most tragic scenes are going on. This aspect of things has its truth, as much as any other. There is a comic side to everything. And there is a fondness of this side of things, which is not heartless, and which does not interfere with reverence. Indeed the perfection of humor, and the most of it will be found in the most earnest and loving souls. And in them it exists in intimate connexion with the pathetic, and seems to flow some how from a common source. It is not a superficial faculty; but flows from the inmost character of the man, and is part of his inspiration. We have remarkable illustrations of it at this day. Is not modern English literature rich, when it can boast at once of three such rare funds of exquisite humor, as Charles Lamb, Carlyle, and "Boz"? and the humor of each so genuine, so entirely his own, and unlike that of the others?

We have already hinted at the optimism of humor. In whomsoever we see this tendency we are assured that they have a good sound healthy faith at bottom, that all will come out right; and so what annoys feebler minds, amuses them. This is not the whole explanation of this faculty, nor can we presume to give its philosophy. But we cannot refrain from suggesting one other fact always discoverable in humor. Humor is essential to the health of very active minds. It enables them to keep their balance, and to recover themselves continually for new effort. It keeps the intense mind buoyed up above a too personal interest in things, and the danger of growing morbid. All successful geniuses have more or less of it in their composition. Where genius is without it, or without that, whatever it be, from which it flows, it works only to consume itself, or rusts, afraid of its own activity.

All intense passion finds vent in it. What does the angry man do, but jeer and caricature his adversary? Violent grief laughs at itself; for it cannot help seeing in the midst of its agony, that, in mourning what must be, it is setting itself against what should be; and so by an unwilling joke, shows that it is returning to reason. So that humor seems to be the natural companion of great activity of mind. It makes activity endurable. Else the nerves, so violently strained, would snap.

Mr. Dickens's humor is such as might be supposed to accompany great activity of the perceptive powers, in a man otherwise in harmony with himself, of good sense, and loving

everything genuine, like himself. Accordingly, it is in the not genuine, as contrasted with the genuine; in the queer figure which all real individual character makes while struggling with too powerful conventionalisms; in the lies, the pretensions, the vanities of an artificial state, so minutely aped from the highest standard of "society" down through all orders to the lowest, that he finds his food for mirth. His quick eye cannot but detect the signs of this all around him. And a great city like London is the very place for it. He looks round him and sees everywhere men strutting in assumed characters, studying to appear, anxiously imitating one another, forgetting to be something; he sees men, willing to part with everything, only not with the pleasure of calling themselves "respectable,' as if that were the thing we live for. He sees the distressed complacency of would-be great men. From one to another he traces the practical lie all through. Too buoyant and full of health to be sickened by it, he takes it simply as a phenomenon, without judging it, and it becomes irresistibly comic. This is the truest and most effective kind of satire. Its arrows fly straight to the mark, because winged by truth and not by personal feeling. Modern society was never more successfully exposed. In the "Pickwick Papers" our author has done this best, though perhaps in the extreme style of caricature. Nevertheless it is a true picture. Mr. Pickwick and his gentlemen followers are a company of mere "respectables," nothings in themselves, made altogether by society, whose life consists in appearing, and whose tragic sufferings spring from their failure to do this well. The humor of the book consists in contrasting these gentlemen with genuine people of the lower sort; in using them as foils to show off the real "mother wit" of such decided characters, as Sam. Weller and his father. The author's fondness for his characters, however, is such, that Mr. Pickwick cannot stay nothing, and becomes more and more of a decided person before we get through. In the present work no humor of which we know in literature, exceeds that of the courtship of Mr. Bumble.

In the pathetic, "Oliver Twist " yields to no novel. No hero of fiction ever took stronger hold of our affections than this poor child. This writer understands the affections. Through all the dark scenes of his story he continually strikes hidden veins of natural goodness, which is a light to itself; he finds gleams of the imperishable heart everywhere. Our interest in

Oliver lies wholly in this. He is not much else, but he is a pure heart.

Of the great tragic power of this work we could say much, had we room. It abounds in the finest tragic situations. The essence of the tragic is in the conflict of the individual with destiny. The highest form of it is where a man struggles not merely with an overruling destiny from without, but with a destiny that works from within and through his own character, as in Hamlet. Our author is not subjective enough for this. His attention is more given to the outward. Yet he rises above the vulgar, merely physical tragedy. The "Flight of Sykes" in this book can hardly be matched for moral power. The old Greek"Furies" of Orestes were not more tragic, than the horrors of conscience which here hunt down the desperate murderer. This scene is worth all the sermons about retribution

ever preached.

And this leads us to speak of the moral tone and tendency of the book. Though a cool and impartial observer, this writer sees things from no centre of indifference. His pictures of society judge society. He delights in exposing all that is false, conventional, and hollow in common life; the lies, which we are living, high and low; the imitation of one another's respectable vices. This he does without levity or malice, with no sneer, and in no morbid spirit. What charms us most is the healthy tone of this writer, as far from indifference, on the one hand, as from any idiosyncratic exaggeration on the other. Deeply as he goes into disgusting details, mortifying to the pride of human nature as are his sly winks at all our little vanities; much as he dwells among the most revolting scenes of a corrupt society, showing at what an expense of loathsome realities all this decency of appearance is kept up; openly as he paints us the worst, which hitherto only sneering skeptics have dared to do; yet he does it in faith and cheerfulness. We see that he still loves man, and hopes for man. There is, in spite of all these sickening details, a something corrective in the general atmosphere of his pictures; he never lets us forget that poured round all is the blithe air of the Universe still,that up above us there the sky is clear, and smiles down upon our scene of misery as if it knew, but forbore to tell, the solution of the riddle which torments us, that the stars are there, that God is alive, and that this world is good. We have said that this work is modern in its ideas. This writer

connects himself with the movement tendency of the age. The love of man shines on his pages. He is a reformer, and believes in making society better. The inference from his story is inevitable. It shows us how much crime in England is a direct and necessary product of their oppressive PoorLaw system, and how crime and depravity everywhere come, more than we think, from our want of sympathy with the poor, our small respect for man as man, our violation of the natural pledge of brotherhood. This drives men into iniquity. Beware how thou judgest the depraved, whom thou perchance hast helped to make!

J. S. D.

ART. III. Tracts for the Times. By Members of the University of Oxford. Four vols. 8vo. 1833-1838. London: Rivingtons.

But

EZRA tells us with what parade and joy the captive Israelites returned by the decree of Cyrus to their desolate cities. As was natural, sorrow at the devastation and pollution of their sacred places, filled their breasts when they again beheld them; but this soon gave way to the labor of renovation. When the work was accomplished the prophet says, "All the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the House of the Lord was laid. many of the Priests and Levites, and chief of the Fathers, who were ancient men that had seen the first House, when the foundation of this House was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice." The ark, the schechinah, the tables of the covenant, Aaron's rod, and the manna, the riches and the boast of the former temple, were gone, and only their holy associations remained. It has often occurred to us that the fathers and ancient men of the English hierarchy must have experienced something of the same feeling, when they compared the latter temple of their land with the former. The unity of doctrine, truth and discipline, the unyielding and all pervading authority, and the august ceremonies of Catholicism, have left merely