The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-01 00:00:00

LITERATI3IIE.

Charles Dickens's New Story,

Our Mutual Friend, No, 2. Chapman and Hall.
Another delghtful number here introduces us to
several new characters. Every one of them—no
less by name than by nature—intensely Bee-like.
Three chapters are here—entitled, respectively,
" Boffin's Bower," " Cut Adrift," and " Mr. Wegg
looks after himself." This last-mentioned person,
Silas 'Wegg to wit, being that very conspicuous
wooden-legged Greenwicti-peneioner.looking man,
seated at a little table, Ai the talreadylfamiliar green
cover, studiously reading a book, with the aid of a
bottle and a steaming glass of grog. Mr. Wegg in
in effect is a stall keeper—crippled by accident—a
" literary man with a wo.cidt.in kg," who vends fruit
and gingerbread to the infantile lieges of the Gown,
by way of eking out for himself a precarious subsist-
ence. The hardest little stall of all the sterile stalls
in London, his is said to be thus humorously—" It
gave you the face-ache to look et his apples,
the stornaoh-ache to look at his oranges, the tooth-
ache to look at his nuts !" The idiosyncracy
of the man is wonderfully imagined and described.
His identification of himself with the establishment
of " Our House" as part and parcel of it—his con-
ceiving to himself all the ins and outs of it—his
subtle adaptation of various salutes to the passers
by—his apportioning of distinctive names to the
different inmates of " Our House"—his habit of
" taking a powerful sight of notice," as he says of
himself—all these minute traits, whims, oddities,
characteristics of the man, are touched in with the
inimitable hand of the Master Humorist. The very
corner of the street in which he passes the chief part
of his existence—don't we know it ? "A howling
corner in the winter time, a dusty corner in the
summer time, an undesirable corner at the best
of times. Shelterless fragments of straw and paper
got-up revolving storms there when the street was
at peace ; and the water cart, as if it were, drunk or
shortsighted, came blundering and jolting round
it, making it muddy when all else was
clean." The introduction to each other here—in
this bleak desolate howling wilderness of a corner—
of Silas %Yagg, the stall.keeper aforesaid, and of
that rhinoceros-like passer-by, who turns out to be
the inheritor of much of the countless wealth of Old
Harmon, the DustmanDustman millionaire (this thick set man
of wealth and sigeur being entitled—so like a Buz
character—Noddy Ruffin the introduction to
each other, at the Street corner, of Silas Wegg
and Noddy Boffin, is most laughably recounted
throughout. Wegg becomes reader to Boffin, at the
rate of a crown a-week—reader to Boffin, of " Gib-
bon's "Decline and Fail." Hence the smock-frocksd
clownish fellow on the green cover, who is gazing
evidently in wonder at the classic frieze with the
basso-relievo illustration of what the wooden-
legged-man is reading. Above, in the right corner
of the green cover, is Mrs. Boffin, a highflyer at
Fashion, it appears, who robes herself habitually
in a low evening drews of black satins with a sable
velvet turban and plumes. The menage of the
Bower by the dust-hills is the oddest thing itna-
gineble—" Buffin's Bower" that is ! la arriving at
which place of destination Mr. Wegg has consider.
able dAnculty. Thanks to which seeming inaeces.
sibility on the part of the Bower, we are told of the
old stall-keeper's wonderfully ludicrous encounter
(as follows) with—