ly perception of him, but what the pedagogical people
call apperception. Our idea of Mr. Wegg is inseparably connected with
our antecedent ideas of general woodenness.

Again, we are introduced to "a large, hard-breathing, middle-aged man,
with a mouth like a fish, dull, staring eyes, and sandy hair standing
upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had been choked and had
at that moment come to." This is Mr. Pumblechook. He does not emerge
slowly like a ship from below the horizon. We see him all at once, eyes,
mouth, hair, and character to match. It is a case of falling into
acquaintance at first sight. We are now ready to hear what Mr.
Pumblechook says and see what he does. We have a reasonable assurance
that whatever he says and does it will be just like Mr. Pumblechook.

We enter a respectable house in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square.
We go out to dinner in solemn procession. We admire the preternatural
solidity of the furniture and the plate. The hostess is a fine woman,
"with neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features and majestic
headdress." Her husband, large and pompous, with little light-colored
wings "more like hairbrushes than hair" on the sides of his otherwise
bald head, begins to discourse on the British Constitution. We now know
as much of Mr. Podsnap as we shall know at the end of the book. But it
is a real knowledge conveyed by the method that gives dinner-parties
their educational value. We forgive Dickens his superfluous discourse on
Podsnappery in general. For his remarks are precisely of the kind which
we make when the party is over, and we sit by the fire generalizing and
allegorizing the people we have met.

That Mr. Thomas Gradgrind was unduly addicted to hard facts might have
been delicately insinuated in the course of two hundred pages. We might
have felt a mild pleasure in the discovery which we had made, and then
have gone our way forgetting what manner of man he was. What is
Gradgrind to us or we to Gradgrind? Dickens introduces him to us in all
his uncompromising squareness--"square coat, square legs, square
shoulders, nay, his very neckcloth is trained to take him by the throat
with an unaccommodating grasp." We are made at once to see "the square
wall of a forehead which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes
found commodious cellarage in the two dark caves overshadowed by the
wall." Having taken all this in at a glance, there is nothing more to be
done