nt rascals. There can be
no doubt that he had the image-making faculty of sensitive genius, and
that much of all he saw and felt went to fill up his canvas and fix
his point of view. Writing to his mother, he once said, 'It is the
fashion to say that people are unfortunate who have lost their money.
Dearest mother, we know better than that;' though 'for years and years
he had to face the great question of daily bread.' But while he could
battle stoutly against losses of this kind, he had no mercy on the
rogues who caused them; and his indignation, accentuated by the strain
of married life on a very narrow income, may account in some degree
for the cynical tone, now sombre, now mocking, which so perceptibly
dominates his earlier writings, and pervades all his books, though in
a lesser and more tolerant way, up to the end. Against this shaded
background, however, we may set many kindly figures, and the contrast
is heightened by the humorous joviality which finds vent in his
talent for caricature. To this we owe the full-length portrait of
Major Gahagan, and a whole gallery of other drawings, usually of
Irishmen, which have been the delight of innumerable readers. The
striking alternation between two extremes of character and conduct,
between tragedy and farce, between ridiculous meanness and pathetic
unselfishness, is to be found in all his novels, though in his later
and finer work it is controlled and tempered to more artistic
proportions. But in the productions of his youth the darker tints so
predominate as to disconcert the judgment of a generation which has
become habituated, at the present day, to a less energetic and
uncompromising style of exposing fools and gibbeting knaves. And after
making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste
which separate us from our fathers in every region of art--and even
admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality,
snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays--we
are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is
superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier
stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From some
passages in them it might be inferred by foreigners that the better
born Englishmen habitually indulged in rudeness toward their social
inferiors, and that English domestics in good houses broke out into
vulgar insolence whenever they could do so with impunity.

Take, fo