rations in _Pickwick_ are incident to its club's extravaganza of
adventure, of which they are part, and are easily separable from the
reality of its wit and humor, and its incomparable freshness; but no
such allowances were needed here. Make what deduction the too scrupulous
reader of _Oliver_ might please for "lowness" in the subject, the
precision and the unexaggerated force of the delineation were not to be
disputed. The art of copying from nature as it really exists in the
common walks had not been carried by any one to greater perfection, or
to better results in the way of combination. Such was his handling of
the piece of solid, existing, every-day life, which he made here the
groundwork of his wit and tenderness, that the book which did much to
help out of the world the social evils it portrayed will probably
preserve longest the picture of them as they then were. Thus far,
indeed, he had written nothing to which in a greater or less degree this
felicity did not belong. At the time of which I am speaking, the
debtors' prisons described in _Pickwick_, the parochial management
denounced in _Oliver_, and the Yorkshire schools exposed in _Nickleby_,
were all actual existences,--which now have no vivider existence than in
the forms he thus gave to them. With wiser purposes, he superseded the
old petrifying process of the magician in the Arabian tale, and struck
the prisons and parish abuses of his country, and its schools of neglect
and crime, into palpable life forever. A portion of the truth of the
past, of the character and very history of the moral abuses of his time,
will thus remain always in his writings; and it will be remembered that
with only the light arms of humor and laughter, and the gentle ones of
pathos and sadness, he carried cleansing and reform into those Augean
stables.

Not that such intentions are in any degree ever intruded by this least
didactic of writers. It is the fact that teaches, and not any
sermonizing drawn from it. _Oliver Twist_ is the history of a child born
in a workhouse and brought up by parish overseers, and there is nothing
introduced that is out of keeping with the design. It is a series of
pictures from the tragi-comedy of lower life, worked out by perfectly
natural agencies, from the dying mother and the starved wretches of the
first volume, through the scenes and gradations of crime, careless or
deliberate, which have a frightful consummation in the last volume, but
are neve