n for breach of promise of marriage brought by Martha
Bardell against Samuel Pickwick admitted in truth in no way whatever of
improvement. Anything like a textual change would have been resented by
the hearers--every one of them Pickwickian, as the case might be, to
a man, woman, or child--as in the estimation of the literary court,
nothing less than a high crime and misdemeanour. Once epitomised for
the Reading, the printed version, at least of the report, was left
altogether intact. Nevertheless, strange to say, there was perhaps no
Reading out of the whole series of sixteen, in the delivery of which
the Author more readily indulged himself with an occasional gag. Every
interpolation of this kind, however, was so obviously introduced on
the spur of the moment, so refreshingly spontaneous and so ludicrously
_apropos_, that it was always cheered to the very echo, or, to put
the fact not conventionally but literally, was received with peals of
laughter. Thus it was in one instance, as we very well remember, in
regard to Mr. Justice Stareleigh--upon every occasion that we saw
him, one of the Reader's most whimsical impersonations. The little
judge--described in the book as "all face and waistcoat"--was presented
to view upon the platform as evidently with no neck at all (to speak
of), and as blinking with owl-like stolidity whenever he talked, which
he always did under his voice, and with apparently a severe cold in the
head. On the night more particularly referred to, Sam Weller, being
at the moment in the witness-box, had just replied to the counsel's
suggestion, that what he (Sam) meant by calling Mr. Pickwick's "a very
good service" was "little to do and plenty to get."--"Oh, quite enough
to get, sir, as the soldier said ven they ordered him three hundred and
fifty lashes." Thereupon--glowering angrily at Sam, and blinking his
eyes more than ever--Mr. Justice Stareleigh remarked, with a heavier
cold in the head than hitherto, in a severe monotone, and with the
greatest deliberation, "You must not tell us what the soldier says
unless the soldier is in court, unless that soldier comes here in
uniform, and is examined in the usual way--it's not evidence." Another
evening, again, we recall quite as clearly to mind, when the Reader was
revelling more even than was his wont, in the fun of this representation
of the trial-scene, he suddenly seemed to open up the revelation of an
entirely new phase in Mr. Winkle's idiosyncrasy.