merry and
wise, says the old adage, is a hard combination. Dickens was both.
With all his boisterous merriment, his volleys of inextinguishable
laughter, he never makes game of what is at all worthy of respect.
Here, as in his later books, right is right, and wrong wrong, and he
is never tempted to jingle his jester's bell out of season, and make
right look ridiculous. And if the humour of "Pickwick" be wholesome,
it is also most genial and kindly. We have here no acrid cynic
sneeringly pointing out the plague spots of humanity, and showing
pleasantly how even the good are tainted with evil. Rather does
Dickens delight in finding some touch of goodness, some lingering
memory of better things, some hopeful aspiration, some trace of
unselfish devotion in characters where all seems soddened and lost. In
brief, the laughter is the laughter of one who sees the foibles, and
even the vices of his fellow-men, and yet looks on them lovingly and
helpfully.

So much the first readers of "Pickwick" might note as the book
unfolded itself to them, part by part; and they might also note one or
two things besides. They might note--they could scarcely fail to do
so--that though there was a touch of caricature in nearly all the
characters, yet those characters were, one and all, wonderfully real,
and very much alive. It was no world of shadows to which the author
introduced them. Mr. Pickwick had a very distinct existence, and so
had his three friends, and Bob Sawyer, and Benjamin Allen, and Mr.
Jingle, and Tony Weller, and all the swarm of minor characters. While
as to Sam Weller, if it be really true that he averted impending ruin
from the book, and turned defeat into victory, one can only say that
it was like him. When did he ever "stint stroke" in "foughten field"?
By what array of adverse circumstances was he ever taken at a
disadvantage? To have created a character of this vitality, of this
individual force, would be a feather in the cap of any novelist who
ever lived. Something I think of Dickens' own blood passed into this
special progeniture of his. It has been irreverently said that
Falstaff might represent Shakespeare in his cups, just as Hamlet might
represent him in his more sober moments. So I have always had a kind
of fancy that Sam Weller might be regarded as Dickens himself seen in
a certain aspect--a sort of Dickens, shall I say?--in an humbler
sphere of life, and who had never devoted himself to literature. There
is