any people eagerly adopted as of kin by
everybody, as its predecessors are famous for; but it has yet a fair
proportion of such as take solid form within the mind and keep hold of
the memory. To these belong in an especial degree Gabriel Varden and his
household, on whom are lavished all the writer's fondness and not a
little of his keenest humor. The honest locksmith with his jovial jug,
and the tink-tink-tink of his pleasant nature making cheerful music out
of steel and iron; the buxom wife, with her plaguy tongue that makes
every one wretched whom her kindly disposition would desire to make
happy; the good-hearted plump little Dolly, coquettish minx of a
daughter, with all she suffers and inflicts by her fickle winning ways
and her small self-admiring vanities; and Miggs the vicious and
slippery, acid, amatory, and of uncomfortable figure, sower of family
discontents and discords, who swears all the while she wouldn't make or
meddle with 'em "not for a annual gold-mine and found in tea and sugar:"
there is not much social painting anywhere with a better domestic moral
than in all these; and a nice propriety of feeling and thought regulates
the use of such satire throughout. No one knows more exactly how far to
go with that formidable weapon, or understands better that what
satirizes everything, in effect satirizes nothing.

Another excellent group is that which the story opens with, in the
quaint old kitchen of the Maypole; John Willett and his friends,
genuinely comic creations all of them. Then we have Barnaby and his
raven: the light-hearted idiot, as unconscious of guilt as of
suffering, and happy with no sense but of the influences of nature; and
the grave sly bird, with sufficient sense to make himself as unhappy as
rascally habits will make the human animal. There is poor brutish Hugh,
too, loitering lazily outside the Maypole door, with a storm of passions
in him raging to be let loose; already the scaffold's withered fruit, as
he is doomed to be its ripe offering; and though with all the worst
instincts of the savage, yet not without also some of the best. Still
farther out of kindly nature's pitying reach lurks the worst villain of
the scene: with this sole claim to consideration, that it was by
constant contact with the filthiest instrument of law and state he had
become the mass of moral filth he is. Mr. Dennis the hangman is a
portrait that Hogarth would have painted with the same wholesome
severity of s