more thickly gilt than we were before. We have grown vulgarly rich and rudely strong within the last twenty-five years; but that is all. In any case, however, the point of our manners and our social tone is not the one on which, after seeing and hearing Mr. Dickens, we should be most anxious in regard to his judgment. Stepping out from the seclusion of his study, Mr. Dickens has placed himself personally before us, and has offered us all, on paying two dollars each, the opportunity of forming an opinion of him as well as of his writings. That opinion it is, we submit, quite proper for us to say is not such as leads us to accept the author of "The Pickwick Papers" as an authority upon manners, or an arbiter elegantium for any people. He is something higher and better than that, it is true; but that he is not. We were aware, of course, that Mr. Dickens, like many men of mark among ourselves, had been in his youth without the advantages of social culture; but, judging by corresponding cases in this country, we supposed that in the position to which his genius had raised him, and which he has held for twenty-five years, he must have acquired, if not by development, at least, by imitation, a certain tone and manner in which we find him entirely wanting. Mr. Dickens reads very well—unusually well, although, according to our taste and the best British authorities, with some serious faults of inflection which we have not opportunity now for pointing out in detail. His dramatic power is very great—not greater than that of several story-tellers whom we have heard in private, but sufficient to have made him a great actor if he had taken to the stage. We have, however, not heard of a single instance in which Mr. Dickens threw for his hearer a new light upon any one of his own creations; but of very many in which his presentation of his own personages was found inferior to the ideal in the mind of his hearer. He succeeds notably with Mr. Winkle, Sergeant Buzfuz, old Weller, and Mr. Micawbe; but he fails with Sam Weller, Captain Cuttle, and in all the characters of a higher grade of culture. The reason of the latter failure is to be found in defects which we have already noticed. We have heard Mr. Dickens' voice spoken of as somewhat weak and husky; but we could have pardoned these blemishes, had we noticed them in any marked degree, much more easily than a certain tone, inflection, and manner, which uncomfortably reminded us of those of a third or fourth-rate Cockney actor telling stories at a free-and-easy supper table. It is not in comic passages, and in the presentation of low characters only that this is manifest: it pervades his whole reading—the narrative no less than the dialogue and the dramatic passages. It sadly mars the enjoyment of his really admirable reading of his exquisitely-humorous works; and, joined to the external appearance and manner of the reader, it relieves us entirely of all concern that we might otherwise have felt in regard to the judgment he might form or express upon our society.
"Sir, respect your dinner!" says Thackeray, with mock solemnity, to his reader, in one of the most charming of his earlier "Fraser Papers." It was a bit of advice, at all events, which that epicure took to his own heart, carrying his theory into practice for two score years. In America the rule is to respect nothing—dinner, of course, included. A magazine article on "a dinner"—an American magazine article on a dinner! and not even on the æsthetics of it, but on the soup and the meat and the wine of it—pooh! pooh! they are trifling with us. Nevertheless, this topic of dinner is a vastly important one in America, where habitually is done, without doubt,
