rtop the gloom. The humor is so
benevolent; the view of errors that have no depravity of heart in them
is so indulgent; the quiet courage under calamity, the purity that
nothing impure can soil, are so full of tender teaching. Its effect as a
mere piece of art, too, considering the circumstances in which I have
shown it to be written, I think very noteworthy. It began with a plan
for but a short half-dozen chapters; it grew into a full-proportioned
story under the warmth of the feeling it had inspired its writer with;
its very incidents created a necessity at first not seen; and it was
carried to a close only contemplated after a full half of it had been
written. Yet, from the opening of the tale to that undesigned
ending,--from the image of little Nell asleep amid the quaint grotesque
figures of the old curiosity warehouse to that other final sleep she
takes among the grim forms and carvings of the old church aisle,--the
main purpose seems to be always present. The characters and incidents
that at first appear most foreign to it are found to have had with it a
close relation. The hideous lumber and rottenness that surround the
child in her grandfather's home take shape again in Quilp and his filthy
gang. In the first still picture of Nell's innocence in the midst of
strange and alien forms, we have the forecast of her after-wanderings,
her patient miseries, her sad maturity of experience before its time.
Without the show-people and their blended fictions and realities, their
wax-works, dwarfs, giants, and performing dogs, the picture would have
wanted some part of its significance. Nor could the genius of Hogarth
himself have given it higher expression than in the scenes by the
cottage door, the furnace-fire, and the burial-place of the old church,
over whose tombs and gravestones hang the puppets of Mr. Punch's show
while the exhibitors are mending and repairing them. And when, at last,
Nell sits within the quiet old church where all her wanderings end, and
gazes on those silent monumental groups of warriors,--helmets, swords,
and gauntlets wasting away around them,--the associations among which
her life had opened seem to have come crowding on the scene again, to be
present at its close,--but stripped of their strangeness; deepened into
solemn shapes by the suffering she has undergone; gently fusing every
feeling of a life past into hopeful and familiar anticipation of a life
to come; and already imperceptibly lifting