as oddity are the kind old
nurse and her husband the carrier, whose vicissitudes alike of love and
of mortality are condensed into the three words since become part of
universal speech, _Barkis is willin'_. There is wholesome satire of much
utility in the conversion of the brutal schoolmaster of the earlier
scenes into the tender Middlesex magistrate at the close. Nor is the
humour anywhere more subtle than in the country undertaker, who makes up
in fullness of heart for scantness of breath, and has so little of the
vampire propensity of the town undertaker in _Chuzzlewit_, that he dares
not even inquire after friends who are ill for fear of unkindly
misconstruction. The test of a master in creative fiction, according to
Hazlitt, is less in contrasting characters that are unlike than in
distinguishing those that are like; and to many examples of the art in
Dickens, such as the Shepherd and Chadband, Creakle and Squeers, Charley
Bates and the Dodger, the Guppys and the Wemmicks, Mr. Jaggers and Mr.
Vholes, Sampson Brass and Conversation Kenge, Jack Bunsby, Captain
Cuttle, and Bill Barley, the Perkers and Pells, the Dodsons and Fogs,
Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig, and a host of others, is to be added the
nicety of distinction between those eminent furnishers of funerals, Mr.
Mould and Messrs. Omer and Joram. All the mixed mirth and sadness of the
story are skilfully drawn into the handling of this portion of it; and,
amid wooings and preparations for weddings and church-ringing bells for
baptisms, the steadily-going rat-tat of the hammer on the coffin is
heard.

Of the heroines who divide so equally between them the impulsive, easily
swayed, not disloyal but sorely distracted affections of the hero, the
spoilt foolishness and tenderness of the loving little child-wife, Dora,
is more attractive than the too unfailing wisdom and self-sacrificing
goodness of the angel-wife, Agnes. The scenes of the courtship and
housekeeping are matchless; and the glimpses of Doctors' Commons,
opening those views, by Mr. Spenlow, of man's vanity of expectation and
inconsistency of conduct in neglecting the sacred duty of making a will,
on which he largely moralizes the day before he dies intestate, form a
background highly appropriate to David's domesticities. This was among
the reproductions of personal experience in the book; but it was a
sadder knowledge that came with the conviction some years later, that
David's contrasts in his earliest m