LIFE AND WRITINGS OF "BOZ,"

The Author of the "Pickwick Papers."

WITH A FULL LENGTH PORTRAIT, PAINTED BY PHIZ.

The Comic Annual" is the only pros perous remnant of those pretty German book-toys; burlesque has driven tragedy from the stage; and farce reigns omnipotent in the twenty-four theatres that are nightly open in London.

We have much pleasure in presenting our readers | Almanacs. with an undoubted likeness of the gentleman who, within the last twelve months, has, under the quaint signature of Boz, earned a distinguished station in the periodical literature of England. "Sketches of Every. day Life" and "Every-day People," appeared in the columns of a London morning paper, (the Chronicle, we believe,) and attracted general attention. The signature, Boz, afforded no clue to the identity of the author, and the proprietors refused to divulge. Mr. William Leman Rede, an actor-author of some talent in the satirical way, obtained the credit of concocting the "Sketches," which every day became more popular; and, when collected into volumes, rapidly coursed through several editions. Mr. W. L. Rede disowned the authorship; the Pickwick papers were announced, and the curiosity of the London public ferreted the writer's secret; Boz himself authorising the discovery by perpetrating the following epigram in the next number of the "Miscellany."

Who the dickens " Boz" could be,

Puzzled many a learned elf; Till time unveil'd the mystery,

We grumble not at the prevailing fondness for fun; cachinnation is the feature of the biped beast; and the human skull retains the distinguishing grin. Indeed, to use the words of a modern writer, that is the reason why the Egyptians elevated skulls in the centre of the table at their merry makings; and if Mr. Bulwer should ever take it into his head to write an Egyptian romance, for the purpose of showing the domestic lives of the people, as he has done in Rome, Pompeii, and Athens, we shall see what a devil-skin, roaring, lamp-breaking, up-all-night set those same dark-featured fellows were. Then, their hieroglyphics were no more than a mask for fun. Poor Champollion thought he had discovered a clue to the mystery of the inscriptions by resolving them into historical data: ti-ri-la, ti-ri-la, Monsieur, look at them again. The angles, and patches of stars and shafts, and broken points, are like one of your French caricatures, in which heads and tails cluster in the foliage of a tree, or peep through the leaves of a violet. The antiquity Mr. Charles Dickens, as our readers may perceive, is of Arch-Waggery, including in its wide range the a young and handsome man. science of Practical Jokery, cannot be doubted. An He was born in the very centre of the kingdom of Cockaigne-within archaic Essay on the subject, written with the requisound of the great bell of Bow-and educated and site gusto and erudition, would discover an intimate reared in the bosom of "The Great Metropolis." He able Bede, whose monkish chronicle is full of the sympathy between George Cruikshank and the venerwas employed as a reporter to the daily press, and continued for some time in that laborious and unpro-philosopher, was the father of some score popular jests, most grotesque badinage. Hierocles, the Alexandrian fitable vocation, without giving sign or token of extraordinary talent, till he burst forth the " "scribatious" Hogarth of the age. He is now employed upon many works of profitable popularity; he is the editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a periodical of the first respectability, and graced with the designs of the inimitable Cruikshank. The Pickwick Papers have attained an extensive circulation-few publications are more anxiously looked for or more eagerly perused.

And "Boz" appear'd as Dickens' self!

which have been assigned to the wit of the day on record, are related by Bede, Giraldus Cambrensis, through descending ages. Some of the best stories St. Irenæus, and Villafranca. The love of mischief prevails throughout the writings of the most profound authorities, who were never less in earnest than when they pretended to be so. What is the Gesta Romanorum, but a bundle of eccentricities? Was not MosJesuits, who compiled the great work upon China, a heim, the theologian, a thorough-paced quiz; and the company of revellers and gasconaders?

"Boz" has been particularly fortunate in making his entrée into the republic of letters at a time when jocularity was the most popular ingredient in a periodical. Some of the English Magazines are now-a-days their drollery under a face of solemn seriousness. But it belonged to the reverend ancients, to hide little better than jest-books; Joe Miller and Peter They acted their farces in a suit of sables. They Pindar are the penny-a-liners, peaks of the bi-forked flung their crackers into the face of the public with mountain, and Apollo himself irradiates his phiz from an air of dignity. We find, as we descend the stream the last new edition of "Broad Grins." The New of time, that this tone of gravity gradually relaxed; Monthly Magazine, lately under the supervision of until, at last, the world, tired, at it were, of the tragedy Campbell and Bulwer, is now vamped up with The drawl, laughed outright. Then came such spirits as Humorist, and edited by Mr. Theodore Hook, "a Rabelais and Sterne, dry, no doubt, and sly; but so choice spirit from Momus's Court." The musty pro-marvellously comic that, although the church was verbs of Poor Richard, the predictions of Partridge, shaken to its foundations by the convulsion, people and the mysticism of Moore, are superseded by Comic would roar as if it were an unavoidable condition of

their existence. All mankind has been addicted to | yond the likeness to constitute excellence-and in this waggery from time immemorial; but, at some periods, Boz' is perfect. His dialogues, without straining for it took a disputatious shape; at others, a quaint and puns, or mere surface effects, are excerpta from veritaallegorical form; occasionally, it was the blow of a ble life, or such as might have been veritable, or truncheon on the head that knocked one's brains into would have been so under the circumstances described, a state of kaleidoscopic confusion; and, anon, it was a heightened of course, to make their full impression. roguish wink and a poke in the ribs. There was Then his minute details exhibit an almost instinctive Robert Burton, with his "Anatomie of Melancholie," knowledge of human character in the classes he defull of humorous fancies that held the reader in sus-picts, and of the accessories of small and every-day pense between a groan and a chuckle-Deshoulières, events. For example, his description of the surgeon as brilliant as a fire-fly-Pascal, all venom and mockery-Skelton and Butler, torturers of thought and language-Molière and Wycherley, unveiling the peccadilloes of the age in so strange a light, that even, as we grew wiser over their pages, we also grew in a ten-fold degree more disposed to ridicule the ways of the wise; and Le Sage, and Fielding, and Smollett, and a thousand more, who, knowing the weak side of nature, tickled it with the sharp stings of their wit. Revenons a Monsieur Boz. The etymology of this name puzzled the pundits. By some, it was thought to be a corruption of 'Fusbos;' others maintained that it was a mistake in the print, and ought to be 'Boss,' which means a protuberance, or knob, which they said was a just definition of one who had suddenly started out from the dead level of literature, and made himself all at once so prominent; not a few considered that it was a direct induction from Buzz,' in the which they were the more confirmed by the incessant vivacity of his writings which, like a humming sound, filled every corner of the subjects they entered; again it was asserted, that it was intended as a point-blank sarcasm upon 'Pos,' the initial title of the dictatorial and sententious school; while the multitude at large believed that it was neither more nor less than an immediate descendant from the immortal Bozzy,' of Johnsonian distinguishment.

The following excellent analysis of Mr. Dickens' merits is from the pen of a distinguished English critic, and deserves a republication in America, where the Pickwick Papers enjoy as high a popularity as they have achieved in the city of old Lud.

or

waiting for the poor woman's hour of release in the
workhouse, and sitting with his face turned towards
the fire, giving the palms of his hands a warm and a
rub, alternately:'-of Sam Weller preparing to write
his love letter, when, looking carefully at the pen to
see that there were no hairs in it, and dusting down the
table so that there should be no crumbs of bread under.
the paper, Sam tucked up the cuffs of his coat, squared
his elbows, and composed himself to write;'-of the
preliminaries to the proceedings of the Temperance
Society, when the secretary having sneezed in a
very impressive manner, and the cough which always
seizes an assembly, when any thing particular is going
to be done, having been duly performed, the following
document was read,' &c.—and the meeting of the
opposite counsel in the court on the morning of Mr.
Pickwick's trial (the whole of which is inimitable),
nodding in a friendly manner to each other, and ob-
serving, to the horror of the defendant, that it was
a fine morning;" are such exact representations of
trivial things, as, however inconsequential in them-
selves, afford at once a test of the author's skill, and
a clue to his unprecedented success. The character
of Sam Weller is rich in originality, and it is sus-
tained throughout with such likelihood that we never
feel as if there was one fraction of his individuality
with which we could dispense, or as if there were
any thing wanted to complete the delineation. But
we need not multiply instances. They are all as fa-
miliar to the public as they are intelligible at first
sight. The genius of Boz' is not dramatic. If it
were it could not be so faithful to actual experience.
It is in the intermixture of description and dialogue-
of the language and tournure-the modes and cos-
tumes of his characters-that his merits and triumph
consist. And it may be observed as a curious and re-
markable trait in these whimsical outlines of low and
middle life, that while Boz' brings before you with
a graphic pen the express image of the poorest and
most ignorant orders, he never descends into vulgarity.
The ordinary conversations of the loose and ribald
multitude are faithfully reported, but by an adroit
process of moral alchemy, all their offensive coarse-
ness is imperceptibly extracted. He gives you the
spirit, but not the letter, of slang; you are never re-

"Whatever may be said or thought of the style spirit of Boz's' productions, their verisimilitude is indisputable. They reflect the manners to which they are addressed, with a felicity that is inseparable from truth. Read one of those papers, and your imagination instantly transports you to the spot-the figures he describes are before you—their voices are in your ears-the very turn of their grimace, their attitudes, their peculiarities, are present to you. What picture of real life can be more faithful, more irresistibly ludicrous, and quiet withal, than the Sunday scene in St. Giles's, where the lounging population are painted smoking and leaning against the posts in the streets? He catches the essential and striking fea-pelled by abasing pruriences, and you are permitted ture at once, and embodies it in a few touches that will survive the races they describe. The vraisemblable is not Boz's' line of art; the vrai is with him all in all. What he gives you is literally true, but like a consummate artist, he does not give it to you literally. It is not enough that a portrait should be a good likeness, it must bear a certain air and grace be

in his pictures to enjoy the broad drollery, released from all its repulsive associations. This is a peculiarity in the writings of Boz,' that reflects unbounded credit upon his taste. The subjects he selects are passed through the alembic of his mind, and come, if we may say so, purified before the public."