with talk of himself, enters upon a relation of something that befell him in his wanderings, and of a sudden—the author perceiving this necessity—vanishes from the scene, which is thenceforth occupied by the figures he has served to introduce. In other words, readers of the periodical called Master Humphrey's Clock having shown some impatience with its desultory character, Dickens converted into a formal novel the bit of writing which he had begun as sketch or gossip. Nowadays it would be all but impossible for a writer of fiction, who by any accident should have written and published serially a work with such a fault of design, to republish it in a volume without correcting the faulty part; a very slight degree of literary conscientiousness, as we understand it, would impose this duty; nay, fear of the public would exact it. But such a thing never occurred to Dickens. Conscientious he was in matters of his art, as we shall have occasion to notice, but the art itself was less exacting in his day; a multitude applauded, and why should he meddle with what they had so loudly approved? In the same way we find Walter Scott coming one fine day upon an old manuscript of his own—two or three chapters of a romance long ago begun and thrown aside. He reads the pages, smiles over them, and sits down to complete
