at awaited him. Every
point was a telling one, and the truthfulness of the whole unerring. The
dreadful restlessness of the place, undefined yet unceasing,
unsatisfying and terrible, was pictured throughout with De Foe's minute
reality; while points of character were handled in that greater style
which connects with the richest oddities of humor an insight into
principles of character universal as nature itself. When he resolved
that Sam Weller should be occupant of the prison with Mr. Pickwick, he
was perhaps thinking of his favorite Smollett, and how, when Peregrine
Pickle was inmate of the Fleet, Hatchway and Pipes refused to leave him;
but Fielding himself might have envied his way of setting about it. Nor
is any portion of his picture less admirable than this. The comedy
gradually deepening into tragedy; the shabby vagabonds who are the
growth of debtors' prisons, contrasting with the poor simple creatures
who are their sacrifices and victims; Mr. Mivins and Mr. Smangle side by
side with the cobbler ruined by his legacy, who sleeps under the table
to remind himself of his old four-poster; Mr. Pickwick's first night in
the marshal's room, Sam Weller entertaining Stiggins in the snuggery,
Jingle in decline, and the chancery prisoner dying; in all these scenes
there was writing of the first order, a deep feeling of character, that
delicate form of humor which has a quaintly pathetic turn in it as well,
comedy of the richest and broadest kind, and the easy handling
throughout of a master in his art. We place the picture by the side of
those of the great writers of this style, of fiction in our language,
and it does not fall by the comparison.

Of what the reception of the book had been up to this time, and of the
popularity Dickens had won as its author, this also will be the proper
place to speak. For its kind, its extent, and the absence of everything
unreal or factitious in the causes that contributed to it, it is
unexampled in literature. Here was a series of sketches, without the
pretense to such interest as attends a well-constructed story; put forth
in a form apparently ephemeral as its purpose; having none that seemed
higher than to exhibit some studies of cockney manners with help from a
comic artist; and after four or five parts had appeared, without
newspaper notice or puffing, and itself not subserving in the public
anything false or unworthy, it sprang into a popularity that each part
carried higher and hi