MRS. PARTINGTON.

I Do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm of Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs. Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town-the tide rose to an incredible height-the waves rushed in upon the houses -and every thing was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, and squeezing out the seawater, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington's spirit was up; but I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. She was excellent at a slop or a puddle; but she should not have meddled with a tempest.

DR. PARR'S SERMON.

WHOEVER has had the good fortune to see Dr. Parr's wig, must have observed, that while it trespasses a little on the orthodox magnitude of perukes in the anterior parts, it scorns even episcopal limits behind, and swells out into boundless convexity of frizz, the mega thauma [the "great wonder"] of barbers, and the terror of the literary world. After the manner of his wig, the Doctor has constructed his sermon, giving us a discourse of no common length, and subjoining an immeasurable mass of notes, which appear to concern every learned thing, every learned man, and almost every unlearned man since the beginning of the world.

By far the most surprising and dazzling literary phenomenon of the century was Charles Dickens. There were many greater men than he, many stronger and loftier

characters; but when we remember all that he lacked in the way of equipment and backing at the outset, and then note the overwhelming conquest of fame and fortune that he, by his unaided force and genius, made, we must acknowledge that no other man so gifted, who used his gifts with such energy and faithfulness, has been seen in this age. No other author in his own lifetime and, except Shakespeare, no other author at any time, has been so familiar a word in all men's mouths, or has received the tribute of such widespread personal affection, as did this low-born son of a Cockney clerk. Among his personal friends were many of the foremost men of Europe and America; and such was the contagion of his companionship, that for the moment his associates seemed to become, in their measure, like himself: to emulate his activity and to share his point of view. It would be difficult to exaggerate his influence upon his time; and though he has been vulgarized by innumerable would-be imitators and burlesquers, his books still amuse thousands of readers, and some of their qualities command the admiration of the severest critics. His sudden death could hardly be realized: it could scarcely be believed that so intense a life, so abounding a vitality, had been extinguished; and there have been few men whose loss was so unaffectedly regretted. We see his foibles and limitations now; but our only wonder should be that they are so few and so amiable.

Charles Dickens was the son of John Dickens, a poor English clerk in the navy pay-office, and was born about eight months later than his great contemporary, Thackeray, on Februrary 7, 1812. But he outlived the author of "Vanity Fair" some seven years, dying on the 9th of June, 1870. He began his "Sketches by Boz" in 1833, when he was twentyone years old, and was continually productive during thirtyseven years, dying, like Thackeray, in the act of working on an unfinished story, "Edwin Drood." From an obscure and penniless hack-writer, he had made himself the most popular author in the world, and had amassed a handsome fortune by his pen, and by public readings from his own works in England, Ireland and America. His literary reputation does not stand so high now as it did thirty years since; but his extraordinary and dazzling genius is incontestable. His contemporary success was due to his enormous humor, to his exaggerated but effective sentiment, to his vivid and dramatic scenic accessories, to the intense light which he cast upon phases of life in the lower and middle classes which had hitherto been unportrayed, to the unfailing and often excessive animation of his narrative, and to the fascination of his personality, which was brought into prominence by his readings. His career, aside from his books, was uneventful: he married, he disagreed with his wife, he twice visited America, he edited a magazine which commanded the largest circulation, at that time, in the world. But his life was full of movement; the story of it affects the reader like a breathless ride in an express train. It was a relentless straining of the nerves, a whirl of excitement, to the last pitch and beyond. Dickens never rested until he died; in his ears was ever the roar of public commendation; ever driving him onward was the necessity to make his triumphs continuous; his thirst for approbation became a mania; his abnormally stimulated emotional nature distorted his sense of proportion and his intellectual judgment; the public which he addressed never knew and never saw Charles Dickens the man, but only the part which he all his life enacted-the part of Charles Dickens the novelist. For Dickens was in truth a great actor with a marvelous gift of literary expression superadded. All that he wrote and did was tinged with the exaggeration, the lime

light extravagance, the caricature of the stage. Very seldom was the simple modesty of nature reproduced in his works. His powers of observation were unequalled, and what he observed he described; but he observed something different from actual existence. He was the subject of a perennial, overwrought hallucination. But the glamour of genius which irradiated his work, his fun, his color, his eye for characteristic features, his intolerance of wrong and his enthusiasm for humanity, overwhelmed criticism, and deceived a generation into sharing his own belief that his delineations were true. And it is only now, after nearly thirty years, that we are able to see him as he really was, and to estimate his work dispassionately by the unchangeable standards of literary art.

The quality of his productions does not vary greatly from the beginning to the end of his career; but upon the whole his earlier books are the best. "Pickwick," his first great success, was pure comedy, and as comedy he never surpassed it. "Oliver Twist," with its humor, its strong characterizations, its strange episodes, its tragic passages and its scathing exposure of abuses, was the type and in some respects the model of all his subsequent work in that line. He had just awakened to a realization of his power, and was exercising it with full enjoyment. Thenceforward there was never an intermission and scarcely a diminution in the tide of his success. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who survived him; in 1849 he established Household Words, the sales of which were immediately enormous. By this time his reputation was fully confirmed. His first visit to America was in 1842, and the fruits of that journey, "American Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit," aroused much personal feeling against him in this country, though they did not diminish the number of his readers here. In 1859, owing to domestic troubles complicated with a quarrel with his publishers, Household Words became All the Year Round, but underwent no other alteration, either in its form or popularity. "David Copperfield," a novel partly autobiographical, and by some preferred to his other works, appeared in 1850. "A Tale of Two Cities," written under the influence of Carlyle's "French Revolution," and admired at the time, though now consid

ered melodramatic, was published in 1859. During the latter years of his life he began the famous series of "Readings" from his books which so greatly increased his personal fame and fortune, but the nervous strain brought him also death before he was sixty. His friends, his physicians, and nature herself warned him, but he kept on, and paid the penalty. He persuaded himself that his only object was to leave a large estate to his family, and protested that the work itself was distasteful to him; yet at the same time he was involuntarily confessing the delight it afforded him to exhibit himself on the platform, to witness his personal success, and to count up his unprecedented gains. His American Readings were fully as successful as those in England, and they also availed to remove the hostility which his "American Notes" twentyfive years before had created. The actor-instinct in the man, not satisfied with the spectacular features which marked his whole career, and with the frequent amateur performances in aid of charities and on other special pretexts which interlarded his other activities, demanded this final gratification; and this, like all else that he craved, was granted him. Dickens was the spoiled darling of fortune and of his public, which included all English-speaking persons, and many others whom he reached through translations. It is greatly to his credit that he always tried to do his very best, never sparing himself in the effort; nor, if we except certain passages in his private life, did he ever commit a dishonorable or unwarrantable act.

Dickens was a man of fine appearance, a trifle above the middle height, with dark curling hair and large, brilliant, expressive eyes. He was of athletic habit, given to long and frequent walks, often at night; for he slept ill, and had a theory that mental labor could be counteracted in its effects by physical exertion-a theory which no doubt hastened his end. His voice on the platform was flexible, eloquent, and finely modulated; his dramatic power remarkable. He rests in Westminster Abbey; and not many of his fellows there have better deserved the honor.