him so tenaciously. It was on a steamboat near Niagara that he heard from his state-room a gentleman complaining to his wife: "Boz keeps himself very close."

But the Monthly Magazine, though warmly welcoming its young contributor's lively sketches, could not afford to pay for them. He was therefore glad to conclude an arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the conductor of the Evening Chronicle, a paper in connexion with the great morning journal on the reporting staff of which he was engaged. He had gratuitously contributed a sketch to the evening paper as a personal favour to Mr. Hogarth, and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors of the Morning Chronicle that Dickens should be duly remunerated for this addition to his regular labours. With a salary of seven instead of, as heretofore, five guineas a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival's Inn - one of those old legal inns which he loved so well-he might already in this year, 1835, consider himself on the highroad to prosperity. By the beginning of 1836 the Sketches by Boz printed in the Evening Chronicle were already numerous enough, and their success was sufficiently established to allow of his arranging for their republication. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by Cruikshank, and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds was paid to him for the copyright. The stepping-stones had been found and passed, and on the last day of March, which saw the publication of the first number of the Pickwick Papers, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. Three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of the friend who had so efficiently aided him in his early literary ventures. Mr. George Hogarth's name thus links together the names of two masters of English fiction; for Lockhart speaks of

him when a writer to the signet in Edinburgh as one of the intimate friends of Scott. Dickens's apprenticeship as an author was over almost as soon as it was begun; and he had found the way short from obscurity to the dazzling light of popularity. As for the Sketches by Boz, their author soon repurchased the copyright for more than thirteen times the sum which had been paid to him for it.

In their collected form these Sketches modestly described themselves as "illustrative of every-day life and every-day people." Herein they only prefigured the more famous creations of their writer, whose genius was never so happy as when lighting up, now the humorous, now what he chose to term the romantic, side of familiar things. The curious will find little difficulty in tracing in these outlines, often rough and at times coarse, the groundwork of more than one finished picture of later date. Not a few of the most peculiar features of Dickens's humour are already here, together with not a little of his most characteristic pathos. It is true that in these early Sketches the latter is at times strained, but its power is. occasionally beyond denial, as, for instance, in the brief narrative of the death of the hospital patient. On the other hand, the humour-more especially that of the Tales-is not of the most refined sort, and often degenerates in the direction of boisterous farce. The style, too, though in general devoid of the pretentiousness which is the bane of “light" journalistic writing, has a taint of vulgarity about it, very pardonable under the circumstances, but generally absent from Dickens's later works. Weak puns are not unfrequent; and the diction but rarely reaches that exquisite felicity of comic phrase in which Pickwick and its successors excel. For the rest, Dickens's favourite passions and favourite aversions alike reflect

themselves here in small. In the description of the election for beadle he ridicules the tricks and the manners of political party-life, and his love of things theatrical has its full freshness upon it-however he may pretend at Astley's that his "histrionic taste is gone," and that it is the audience which chiefly delights him. But of course the gift which these Sketches pre-eminently revealed in their author was a descriptive power that seemed to lose sight of nothing characteristic in the object described, and of nothing humorous in an association suggested by it. Whether his theme was street or river, a Christmas dinner or the extensive groves of the illustrious dead (the old clothes shops in Monmouth Street), he reproduced it in all its shades and colours, and under a hundred aspects, fanciful as well as real. How inimitable, for instance, is the sketch of "the last cab-driver, and the first omnibus cad," whose earlier vehicle, the omnipresent "red cab," was not the gondola, but the very fire-ship of the London

streets.

Dickens himself entertained no high opinion of these youthful efforts; and in this he showed the consciousness of the true artist, that masterpieces are rarely thrown off at hazard. But though much of the popularity of the Sketches may be accounted for by the fact that commonplace people love to read about commonplace people and things, the greater part of it is due to genuine literary. merit. The days of half-price in theatres have followed the days of coaching; "Honest Tom" no more paces lobby in a black coat with velvet facings and cuffs, and a D'Orsay hat; the Hickses of the present time no longer quote "Don Juan" over boarding-house dinner - tables; and the young ladies in Camberwell no longer compare young men in attitudes to Lord Byron, or to "Satan"

the

Montgomery. But the Sketches by Boz have survived their birth-time; and they deserve to be remembered among the rare instances in which a young author has no sooner begun to write than he has shown a knowledge of his real strength. As yet, however, this sudden favourite of the public was unaware of the range to which his powers were to extend, and of the height to which they were to mount,

CHAPTER II.

FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS.

[1836-1841.]

EVEN in those years of which the record is brightest in the story of his life, Charles Dickens, like the rest of the world, had his share of troubles-troubles great and small, losses which went home to his heart, and vexations manifold in the way of business. But in the history of his early career as an author the word failure has no place.

Not that the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published as they were in monthly numbers, at once took the town by storm; for the public needed two or three months to make up its mind that "Boz" was equal to an effort considerably in advance of his Sketches. But when the popularity of the serial was once established, it grew with extraordinary rapidity until it reached an altogether unprecedented height. He would be a bold man who should declare that its popularity has very materially diminished at the present day. Against the productions of Pickwick, and of other works of amusement of which it was the prototype, Dr. Arnold thought himself bound seriously to contend among the boys of Rugby; and twenty years later young men at the university talked nothing but Pickwick, and quoted nothing but Pickwick, and the wittiest of undergraduates set the world at large