alm,--though tragedy is not beaten altogether without a struggle
either. Here is the story as it unfolds itself. The two heroes are
Ralph Nickleby and his nephew Nicholas. They stand forth, almost from
the beginning, as antagonists, in battle array the one against the
other; and the story is, in the main, a history of the campaigns
between them--cunning and greed being mustered on the one side, and
young, generous courage on the other. At first Nicholas believes in
his uncle, who promises to befriend Nicholas's mother and sister, and
obtains for Nicholas himself a situation as usher in a Yorkshire
school kept by one Squeers. But the young fellow's gorge rises at the
sickening cruelty exercised in the school, and he leaves it, having
first beaten Mr. Squeers,--leaves it followed by a poor shattered
creature called Smike. Meanwhile Ralph, the usurer, befriends his
sister-in-law and niece after his own fashion, and tries to use the
latter's beauty in furtherance of his trade as a money-lender.
Nicholas discovers his plots, frustrates all his schemes, rescues, and
ultimately marries, a young lady who had been immeshed in one of them;
and Ralph, at last, utterly beaten, commits suicide on finding that
Smike, through whom he had been endeavouring all through to injure
Nicholas, and who is now dead, was his own son. Such are the book's
dry bones, its skeleton, which one is almost ashamed to expose thus
nakedly. For the beauty of these novels lies not at all in the plot;
it is in the incidents, situations, characters. And with beauty of
this kind how richly dowered is "Nicholas Nickleby"! Take the
characters alone. What lavish profusion of humour in the theatrical
group that clusters round Mr. Vincent Crummles, the country manager;
and in the Squeers family too; and in the little shop-world of Mrs.
Mantalini, the fashionable dressmaker; and in Cheeryble Brothers, the
golden-hearted old merchants who take Nicholas into their
counting-house. Then for single characters commend me to Mrs.
Nickleby, whose logic, which some cynics would call feminine, is
positively sublime in its want of coherence; and to John Browdie, the
honest Yorkshire cornfactor, as good a fellow almost as Dandie
Dinmont, the Border yeoman whom Scott made immortal. The high-life
personages are far less successful. Dickens had small gift that way,
and seldom succeeded in his society pictures. Nor, if the truth must
be told, do I greatly care for the description of