l the sham gentlemen and all
the real gentlemen with the same gloomy and incurable contempt. He
offers wine to the offensive Podsnap or the shrieking Tippins with a
melancholy sincerity and silence; but he offers his letter to the
aristocratic and unconscious Mortimer with the same sincerity and with
the same silence. It is a great pity that the Analytical Chemist only
occurs in two or three scenes of this excellent story. As far as I know,
he never really says a word from one end of the book to the other; but
he is one of the best characters in Dickens.

Round the Veneering dinner-table are collected not indeed the best
characters in Dickens, but certainly the best characters in _Our Mutual
Friend_. Certainly one exception must be made. Fledgeby is unaccountably
absent. There was really no reason why he should not have been present
at a dinner-party given by the Veneerings and including the Lammles. His
money was at least more genuine than theirs. If he had been present the
party would really have included all that is important in _Our Mutual
Friend_. For indeed, outside Mr. Fledgeby and the people at the
dinner-party, there is something a little heavy and careless about the
story. Mr. Silas Wegg is really funny; and he serves the purpose of a
necessary villain in the plot. But his humour and his villainy seem to
have no particular connection with each other; when he is not scheming
he seems the last man likely to scheme. He is rather like one of
Dickens's agreeable Bohemians, a pleasant companion, a quoter of fine
verses. His villainy seems an artificial thing attached to him, like his
wooden leg. For while his villainy is supposed to be of a dull, mean,
and bitter sort (quite unlike, for instance, the uproarious villainy of
Quilp), his humour is of the sincere, flowing and lyric character, like
that of Dick Swiveller or Mr. Micawber. He tells Mr. Boffin that he will
drop into poetry in a friendly way. He does drop into it in a friendly
way; in much too really a friendly way to make him convincing as a mere
calculating knave. He and Mr. Venus are such natural and genuine
companions that one does not see why if Venus repents Wegg should not
repent too. In short, Wegg is a convenience for a plot and not a very
good plot at that. But if he is one of the blots on the business, he is
not the principal one. If the real degradation of Wegg is not very
convincing, it is at least immeasurably more convincing than the
pretended