with Alexander the Coppersmith. Yet we do not know any man who has done more for the poetry and the picturesque of the bread tax than Mr. Dickens. For wit, perception of character, graphic delineation of those ephemeral human phenomena which elude the grasp of a less delicate perception, he has hardly any rival. Above all, the sort of photogenic quality of his mind, by which every shade and hue of the most neglected and insignificant portions of the moral landscape are made as instinct with interest, truth, and life as the most important and striking, is a feature of it which we do not remember ever to have seen approached by other writers. "It is his nature's

plague to spy into abuses." He reminds us of cinder gatherers, who find something by which they can profit in the rubbish that society casts away. He catches up the dross, and makes it shine like pure gold. Nay, he is a sort of moral alchymist, that can convert the worthless into the precious, and show the uses and the significancy of everything that lives, and moves, and has a being. He "gathers up the fragments" of our nature, that "nothing

may be lost." With miraculous touch he can feed, out of the most lenten entertainment, the perishing multitude, and convert water into wine. Like Goldsmith, there is nothing which he does not touch, and nothing he touches which he does not adorn.

But "more than that, than this, than these, than all," we like him for this, that his big heart is in the right place; that he is a man of large humanities: that his moral sympathies are catholic, and his affections universal. He is, as it were, a watchman for heaven. Not a sparrow falleth to the ground, but he registers it in his great history of life. His genius, his wit, his graphic power, and the interest which he gives to all that he sketches, these give him ready access to every circle of society, and make his writings relished equally by the peer, and the peasant; the little milliner in her back parlour, and the great duchess in her boudoir. Scenes that the great cannot even imagine, he carries straight into their drawingroom. Phases of human life, which the rich and powerful either never have an opportunity of observing, or carefully avoid all chance of

:

bringing within the sphere of their observation, he presents to them in their most striking. aspects, without offending their delicacy by the hideous accessories of their actual condition. While he causes the most abject and loathsome objects to come between the wind and their nobility, they are made picturesque and interesting rather than horrible, and stand before the mind rather to teach it a wholesome lesson, and to make pomp take physic, than to disgust without instructing, or wound without amending.

It is a mighty privilege this of genius to make itself heard equally in the kitchen and the hall; to enter in at the straight gate of supercilious rank, or proud and fastidious fashion, and yet to be a welcome passenger in the broad thoroughfare of the vulgar, commonplace working-day world. It is, as it were, to be the conductor that connects the positive and negative poles of society; to be the ambassador from poverty to pride, or the mediator between the abjectness of hopeless penury and the superb magnificence of affluent aristocracy. This, we say, is a mighty privilege,

and this great writer has used it well and wisely. He hath a noble and a Christian heart. He looks upon a human being simply as such, as something inexpressibly great, and upon an immortal creature as of infinite value and significancy. He feels that a man is more precious than many sparrows, and that blurred, and marred, and vitiated though the likeness be, yet there stands the image of his heavenly Father. In his kind and manly breast every fellow-creature finds a willing advocate; the wailing of the desolate catches his ever-listening ear, and the despairing look of the familiar child of wretchedness meets his mild, keen glance, although there should be none other to register its sullen grief.

He makes the cries of the poor to be heard in the palace. And gets the miserable an entrance into the great man's house. The poor orphan, that finds what it is to be in a solitary desert in the thick- peopled city; that, surrounded by a million of professing Christians, is yet alone, and without hope in the world ; that tells his dreadful story with patient sadness, but gets no one, in that dense, bustling,

busy, money-getting crowd, to hear him for his cause; why he, of all that populous calvacade, arrests one passing stranger, and he, pen in hand, proclaims his brother's wrongs through the wide extent of broad Britain.

And that same cunning penman, how strange his taste! He finds a forlorn infant so desperate in fortune that even its miserable mother has left it on the step to do or die; and of all the cases for the genteel humane, the drawing

Christianity, the silk-stockings-andpumps philanthropy of the times, it so turns out that he will have none other, but only this. He walks straight into the workhouse, and when other men see only some parish brats that are to be abused and poisoned, and sickened with insult, and bad usage into death; why there he sees the soft, innocent, ingenuous, grief-shaded countenance of thoughtful boyhood, and his sound heart yearns the more to him that he has neither father nor mother; nay, none other to take his part in all this selfish, money-getting, civil-barbarous age and nation, save this one great and glorious oak that flings out its fantastic