malpractices
under our own.

The genius of chivalry, which had walked with such power among men, was
exorcised by the pen of Cervantes. He did but clothe it with the name
and images of Don Quixote de la Mancha and his faithful Squire, and
ridicule destroyed what argument could not reach.

This power belongs in an eminent degree to some of the personifications
of our guest. A short time ago it was discovered that a petty tyrant had
abused the children who had been committed to his care. No long and
elaborate discussion was needed to arouse the public mind. He was
pronounced a perfect Squeers, and eloquence could go no further. Happy
is he who can add a pleasure to the hours of childhood, but far happier
he who, by fixing the attention of the world on their secret sufferings,
can protect or deliver them from their power.

But it is not only as a portrayer of public wrongs that we are indebted
to our friend. What reflecting mind can contemplate some of those
characters without being made more kind-hearted and charitable? Descend
with him into the very sink of vice--contemplate the mistress of a
robber--the victim of a murderer--disgraced without--polluted
within--and yet when, in better moments, her natural kindness breaks
through the cloud, then she tells you that no word of counsel, no tone
of moral teaching, ever fell upon her ear. When she looks forward from a
life of misery to a death by suicide, you cannot but feel that there is
no condition so degraded as not to be visited by gleams of a higher
nature, and rejoice that He alone will judge the sin who knows also the
temptation. Again, how strongly are the happiness of virtue and the
misery of vice contrasted. The morning scene of Sir Mulberry Hawk and
his pupil brings out in strong relief the night scene of Kit Nubbles and
his mother. The one in affluence and splendor, trying to find an easier
position for his aching head, surrounded with means and trophies of
debauchery, and thinking "there would be nothing so snug and comfortable
as to die at once." The other in the poorest room, earning a precarious
subsistence by her labors at the wash-tub--ugly, and ignorant, and
vulgar, surrounded by poverty, with one child in the cradle, and the
other in the clothes-basket, "whose great round eyes emphatically
declared that he never meant to go to sleep any more, and thus opened a
cheerful prospect to his relations and friends"--and yet in this
situation, with only the comf