one to which I have never yet seen the tribute of grateful homage adequately or even decently paid. The sonorous claims of old Bill Barley on the reader's affectionate and respectful interest have not remained without response; but the landlord's Jack has never yet, as far as I am aware, been fully recognised as great among the greatest of the gods of comic fiction. We are introduced to this lifelong friend in a waterside public-house as a ‘grizzled male creature, the "Jack" of the little causeway, who was as slimy and smeary as if he had been low watermark too.' It is but for a moment that we meet him: but eternity is in that moment.

'While we were comforting ourselves by the fire after our meal, the Jack-who was sitting in a corner, and who had a bloated pair of shoes on, which he had exhibited, while we were eating our eggs and bacon, as interesting relics that he had taken a few days ago from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore-asked me if we had seen a four-oared galley going up with the tide? When I told him No, he said she must have gone down then, and yet she "took up two," when she left there.

"They must ha' thought better on't for some reason or another," said the Jack, "and gone down."

"A four-oared galley, did you say?" said I.

""A four," said the Jack, "and two sitters."

""Did they come ashore here?"

6.66

'They put in with a stone two-gallon jar for some beer. I'd ha' been glad to pison the beer myself," said the Jack, "or put some rattling physic in it."

""Why?"

"I know why," said the Jack. He spoke in a slushy voice, as if much mud had washed into his throat.

666

""He thinks,” said the landlord, a weakly meditative man with a pale eye, who seemed to rely greatly on his Jack, "he thinks they was, what they wasn't."

""I knows what I thinks," observed the Jack.

"You thinks Custum 'Us, Jack?" said the landlord. ""I do," said the Jack.

"Then you're wrong, Jack."

"AM I!"

'In the infinite meaning of his reply and his boundless confidence in his views, the Jack took one of his bloated shoes off, looked into it, knocked a few stones out of it on the kitchen floor, and put it on again. He did this with the air Vol. 196.-No. 391,

D

of a Jack who was so right that he could afford to do anything.

""Why, what do you make out that they done with their buttons then, Jack?" said the landlord, vacillating weakly.

"Done with their buttons?" returned the Jack. "Chucked 'em overboard. Swallered 'em. Sowed 'em, to come up small salad. Done with their buttons!"

"Don't be cheeky, Jack," remonstrated the landlord, in a melancholy and pathetic way.

""A Custum 'Us officer knows what to do with his Buttons," said the Jack, repeating the obnoxious word with the greatest contempt, "when they comes betwixt him and his own light. A Four and two sitters don't go hanging and hovering, up with one tide and down with another, and both with and against another, without there being Custum 'Us at the bottom of it." Saying which, he went out in disdain.'

To join Francis the drawer and Cob the water-bearer in an ever-blessed immortality.

This was the author's last great work: the defects in it are as nearly imperceptible as spots on the sun or shadows on a sunlit sea. His last long story, 'Our Mutual Friend,' superior as it is in harmony and animation to 'Little Dorrit' or 'Dombey and Son,' belongs to the same class of piebald or rather skewbald fiction. As in the first great prose work of the one greater and far greater genius then working in the world the cathedral of Notre Dame is the one prevailing and dominating presence, the supreme and silent witness of life and action and passion and death, so in this last of its writer's completed novels the real protagonist-for the part it plays is rather active than passive-is the river. Of a play attributed on the obviously worthless authority of all who knew or who could have known anything about the matter to William Shakespeare, but now ascribed on the joint authority of Bedlam and Hanwell to the joint authorship of Francis Bacon and John Fletcher, assisted by the fraternal collaboration of their fellow-poets Sir Walter Raleigh and King James I, it was very unjustly said by Dr Johnson that 'the genius of the author comes in and goes out with Queen Katherine.' Of this book it might more justly be said that the genius of the author ebbs and flows with the disappearance and the reappearance of the Thames.

That unfragrant and insanitary waif of its rottenest

refuse, the incomparable Rogue Riderhood, must always hold a chosen place among the choicest villains of our selectest acquaintance. When the genius of his immortal creator said "Let there be Riderhood,' and there was Riderhood, a figure of coequal immortality rose reeking and skulking into sight. The deliciously amphibious nature of the venomous human reptile is so wonderfully preserved in his transference from Southwark Bridge to Plashwater Weir Mill Lockhouse that we feel it impossible for imagination to detach the water-snake from the water, the water-rat from the mud. There is a horrible harmony, a hellish consistency, in the hideous part he takes in the martyrdom of Betty Higden-the most nearly intolerable tragedy in all the tragic work of Dickens. Even the unsurpassed and unsurpassable grandeur and beauty of the martyred old heroine's character can hardly make the wonderful record of her heroic agony endurable by those who have been so tenderly and so powerfully compelled to love and to revere her. The divine scene in the children's hospital is something that could only have been conceived and that could only have been realised by two of the greatest among writers and creators: it is a curious and memorable thing that they should have shone upon our sight together.

That

We can only guess what manner of tribute Victor Hugo might have paid to Dickens on reading how Johnny 'bequeathed all he had to dispose of, and arranged his affairs in this world.' But a more incomparable scene than this is the resurrection of Rogue Riderhood. is one of the very greatest works of any creator who ever revealed himself as a master of fiction: a word, it should be unnecessary to repeat, synonymous with the word creation. The terrible humour of it holds the reader entranced alike at the first and the hundredth reading. And the blatant boobies who deny truthfulness and realism to the imagination or the genius of Dickens, because it never condescended or aspired to wallow in metaphysics or in filth, may be fearlessly challenged to match this scene for tragicomic and everlasting truth in the work of Sardou or Ibsen, of the bisexual George Eliot or the masculine Miss Mævia Mannish.' 6 M. Zola, had he imagined it, as undoubtedly his potent and indisputable

genius might have done, must have added a flavour of blood and a savour of ordure which would hardly have gratified or tickled the nostrils and the palate of Dickens: but it is possible that this insular delicacy or prudery of relish and of sense may not be altogether a pitiable infirmity or a derisible defect. Every scene in which Mr Inspector or Miss Abbey Potterson figures is as lifelike as it could be if it were foul instead of fair-if it were as fetid with the reek of malodorous realism as it is fragrant with the breath of kindly and homely nature.

The fragmentary 'Mystery of Edwin Drood' has things in it worthy of Dickens at his best: whether the completed work would probably have deserved a place among his best must always be an open question. It is certain that if Shakespeare had completed 'The Two Noble Kinsmen'; if Hugo had completed Les Jumeaux'; or if Thackeray had completed 'Denis Duval,' the world would have been richer by a deathless and a classic masterpiece. It is equally certain that the grim and tragic humours of the opium den and the boy-devil are worthy of the author of 'Barnaby Rudge,' that the leading villain is an original villain of great promise, and that the interest which assuredly, for the average reader, is not awakened in Mr Drood and Miss Bud is naturally aroused by the sorrows and perils of the brother and sister whose history is inwoven with theirs. It is uncertain beyond all reach of reasonable conjecture whether the upshot of the story would have been as satisfactory as the conclusion, for instance, of 'David Copperfield' or 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' or as far from satisfactory as the close of 'Little Dorrit' or 'Dombey and Son.'

If Dickens had never in his life undertaken the writing of a long story, he would still be great among the immortal writers of his age by grace of his matchless excellence as a writer of short stories. His earlier Christmas books might well suffice for the assurance of a lasting fame; and the best of them are far surpassed in excellence by his contributions to the Christmas numbers of his successive magazines. We remember the noble 'Chimes,' the delightful Carol,' the entrancing Cricket on the Hearth,' the delicious Tetterbys who make 'The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain' immortal and unghostly, and even the good stolid figure of Clemency Newcome,

which redeems from the torpid peace of absolute nonentity so nearly complete a failure as 'The Battle of Life'; but the Christmas work done for 'Household Words' and 'All the Year Round' is at its best on a higher level than the best of these. 'The Wreck of the Golden Mary' is the work of a genius till then unimaginable—a Defoe with a human heart. More lifelike or more accurate in seamanship, more noble and natural in manhood, it could not have been if the soul of Shakespeare or of Hugo had entered into the somewhat inhuman or at least insensitive genius which begot Robinson Crusoe on Moll Flanders.

Among the others every reader will always have his special favourites: I do not say his chosen favourites; he will not choose but find them; it is not a question to be settled by judgment but by instinct. All are as good of their kind as they need be: children and schoolboys soldiers and sailors, showmen and waiters, landladies and cheap-jacks, signalmen and cellarmen: all of them actual and convincing, yet all of them sealed of the tribe of Dickens; real if ever any figures in any book were real, yet as unmistakable in their paternity as the children of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, or of Fielding. A modest and honest critic will always, when dealing with questions of preference in such matters, be guided by the example of the not always exemplary Mr Jingle—' not presume to dictate, but broiled fowl and mushrooms-capital thing!' He may in that case indicate his own peculiar addiction to the society of Toby Magsman and Mr Chops, Captain Jorgan, Mr Christopher (surely one of the most perfect figures ever drawn and coloured by such a hand as Shakespeare's or Dekker's or Sterne's or Thackeray's), Mrs Lirriper and Major Jackman, Dr Marigold, and Barbox Brothers. The incredible immensity, measurable by no critic ever born, of such a creative power as was needed to call all these into immortal life would surely, had Dickens never done any work on a larger scale of invention and construction, have sufficed for a fame great enough to deserve the applause and the thanksgiving of all men worthy to acclaim it, and the contempt of such a Triton of the minnows as Matthew Arnold. A man whose main achievement in creative literature was to make himself by painful painstaking into a sort of pseudo-Wordsworth could pay no other tribute than that of stolid scorn to a genius of