The Sun.
London, England, 1848-04-13 00:00:00

' • Have you no printed copies?' exclaimed many.
"' They are all exhausted,' said another, they were
printed in the night. We did not expect such a de-
mand.'

" Will the Nforrne appear to-morrow ?'
" I know not. I believe the writers will be too
much engaged.'
" I believe them, for from the lead of a journal with
scarce enough abennes to keep it alive, they have, by a
bold stroke, attained to the lead of a nation. Fer-
dinand Flocon is one of the Provisional Government."
Two of the subordinate actors in the Revolution of
February must not be overlooked, namely, the work-
man (TuEonous Six, a carpet maker) who
by a burst of rude eloquence preserved
the works of art in the Chambre des Deputes from
destruction, when the people were firing bullets
into the great painting of "Louis Philippe
swearing obedience to the Charter"—and the English
compositor (GEORGE GOOD, formerly a working
printer on an establishment in London), who was shot
through the breast while cheering the combatants on
to the assault upon the Palais Royale. Two engrav-
ings are prefixed to the volume—one a wretched
caricature of the noble countenance of Lamartine, the
other a beautiful sketch of the sinister visage of Guizot.

MAGAZINES, ..,c.—(CONTINUED.)

DOMBEY AND AS'ON. By Charles Dickens.
Sorrowfully do we close the double number (XIX.
and XX.) of ",Dombey and Son" just published. Our
regret is not an affectation. We are neither writing
the balderdash of compliment nor the hyper-
boles of panegyric. An old friend has left
us—the voice of a dear favourite is silent—
" Dombey and Son" is completed. Heartily do we
regret this, for this true English story-book, which
has appeared from month to month, with its chequered
incidents, its exquisite and touching pathos, its fre-
quent, spontaneous, and fantastic merriment,
its occasional grotesqueness, its pervading loyalty
to the natural, the true, and the beautiful, its
home-touches, its gleams of satire, its erotic
benevolence, its unforced philosophy, and, above all
its many, strange, original, life-like, and admirable
characters—the true English story, we say, in which
all this has been lavished with the abundance of a
fruitful but untutored genius, has imparted so much
zest to every successive interval in the course of
its publication, has scattered, as it were, such
sweet flowers upon the dusty path of life, while Time
has bran rolling us all onward to Eternity, that we
should be ungrateful were we not to lament its ter-
mination. We do regret it—thoroughly. That Mr.
Dickens can sympathise in this feeling we know from
his books. Their closing sentences are generally
dictated in a mood of sadness and lamentation.
As lie hi •
mself has happily expressed it in
One of his brief but suggestive introductions, the
author, like a dejected host, is fain to loiter upon the
threshold even when he has dismissed bis guests, and
bade the last of them farewell. In "Dombey and
Son," for example, are loath to imagine that our
acquaintance withtriee
_ t creations in the vo-
lume has terminated. Captainarn Cuttle, either
as "Ed'ard Cuttle
home at ease," or er, who lives at
with the instrument," in allusiy assn
l "the gentleman
to his hook, is
can,
not exactly the man whose fristidsliP
again,
without a sigh. Major LlAgstook e
3 resigneda
, roughsto
and tough, old J. B , Sir, Josh, Joseph, J.b
ck,
Joe 8.," or whatever abbreviation he might gplease
to call himself by in his delightful spirit of egotism,
is one of those abominable beings one regards with a
sort of contemptuous affection such we ourselves
well remember to have experienced towards Daniel
Quilp. Mr. Toodle, the stcker, " all cindery and
swarth;" Polly Toodle, otherwise Mrs. Richards, his
better-half, in her way a kind of middle-aged
Mrs. Nubbles ; and even that precocious imp the
Biler, or the Grinder, the first-born of their large
family of Toodles—are all such truthful specimens
of our labouring classes as not to be abandoned wil-
lingly or forgotten very speedily. Then, more-
over, there is Towlinson, whose ambition is
to set up in the green-grocery line, and whose parti-
cular antipathy are foreigners. There is the Major's
Oriental helot " the Native," described in the last
number (page 579), as " living in a rainy season of
boot-jacks and brushes." There is Mr. Morfin, whose
performancea on the violincello gave his deaf land-
lady only a " sensation of something rumbling in her
bones." There is that grim and awful harridan, Mrs.
Pipchin, with her partiality for sweetbreads and re-
lays of buttered toast, hot and hot. There is Dr.
Blimber with his learned legs, like a clerical piano-
forte ; and Mrs. Blimber with her blue-stocking love
for Cicero and Tusculum ; and Cornelia Blimber, a
very ghoul among dead languages ; and Mr. Feeder,
B.A. with his Herodotus and other stops—quite a
barrel organ of erudition ! Then again, there is Carker,
the manager—" deceased person with white teeth :" and
Perch, the messenger, an oracle not on a tripod, but
on a bracket; and Cousin Feenix, with his friend
Shakspere—" man who was'nt for an age, but for all
time.' There is Mrs. Macstinger, of Brig-place, the
lady who cooled her temper by inverting her young-
est born, Alexander Macstinger, so as to bring him
within the range of a sharp battery of slaps. There
is the oracular Bunsby, and Mrs. Miff, with her
mortified bonnet; and Susan Nipper, and good Mrs.
Brown, and Lucretia Tox, and Mr. Chick, and Mrs.
Chick, and Mrs. Skewton, and Cleopatra's page,
commonly called Withers the Wan ; and Walter
Gay, and Sol Gills, the instrument maker ; and
there is Sir Barnet Skettles, and the weak-eyed
young man at Dr. Blimber's, and Master
Bitherstone, and poor Berry, and Diogenes,
and Mr. Toots and the Game Chicken, and
Alice, and Edith, and Mr. Dombey, and Flo-
rence, and little Paul Dombey ! Those, and
there are thousands of them, who have, like ourselves,
'devoured the work bit by bit—familiarising them-
selves by long association with the every characteris-
tic of the ideal personages depicted in the narrative
—and coming at last to regard with a sort of tender-
ness even the green covers of the monthly instalment,
as being connected in some fashion with the joys and
sorrows of the story, and by consequence with their
own tears and laughter, will comprehend our regret
at the dispersion of this imaginary multitude. It is
not the least important or the least remark-
able among the numerous peculiarities of Mr.
Dickens as a novelist, that he sketches a
locality with as much vividness as a painter,
and that he imparts to a fictitious being an
absolute and visible individuality. The actors in his
tales are no mere pasteboard funtoccini, moved by the
threads of an ingenious plot, and coloured into the
semblance of life by the lustre of his imagination—
they are as actual as flesh and blood, as true as
humanity, as filled with the heat of passion
and as fraught with the vitality of sentiment as the
creature modelled by the band of Prometheus and
warmed into animation by the lire stolen from the
celestial laboratory. If there were nothing worthy of
admiration in " Dombey and Son" beyond the passage
descriptive of the death of Little Paul, it would
from that solitary passage have been worthy of a dis-
tinguished place among the classic books of our
national literature. In that exquisite chapter -- a
chapter stamped with the golden seal of genius—
Mr. Dickens altogether surpassed himself,
he surpassed his plaintive sketch of Tiny
Tim's death in the " Christmas Carol,"
and even that most beautiful, and, as we had
once imagined, inimitable, incident in the " Old
Curiosity Shop "—the death of Little Nell. We
envy not that man who can read for the first time
the account of the death of little Paul Dombey with
a heart unmoved and an eye tearless. We can
have no sympathy with each other—we are separated
in disposition by a wall of brass.. . Like most of
the preceding fictions of Mr. Dickens, "Dombey
and Son" inculcates a great moral inferentially,
and demonstrates the omnipotence of virtue by
the transformation of a temperament. In this
manner " The Christmas Carol" proclaimed
anew those glorious tidings which were sung by
angels in the sky on the eve of the first Christmas—
Gloria in excelsis deo, et in terra pax liominibus.
Peace, goodwill, brotherly love, universal charity one
towards another was the moral of that matchless book.
" Martin Chuzzlewit" in a different way asserted the
policy of gentle feelings for our neighbours. "Dombey
and Son," upon a similar principle, shows the hol-
lowness of egotism and the misery resulting from
the isolation caused by self-sufficiency. Ebenezer
Scrooge is changed before the close of the
volume from a miser into a philanthropist.
Young Martin abandons his selfishness foernerges
gene-
rosity ; and Dombey, the great merchant,
towards the close of the present hfisotobrey
noble-
armour of his Pride, proving himsel
at
ere. of For
the
For the
hearted, generous, gentle, loving t
enforcement of this beautiful dogmawhich are associated
nof meekness, for
the eloquent revelations of love
Iciloferenacned,
tfhore
with every fragment it n.
n ofa reference
child'sto
the bewitching delinea
child's death, in the person of
exquisite picture of a
little Paul—" Dmbey and Son" is assuredly the
masterpiece of Charlesn Dickens. There is in it no
parallel passage',it
true, to that most eloquent and
even sublime reverie in the tower of Saint Paul's
Cathedral, which may be found in one of the random
and insulated chapters of " Master Humphrey's
Clock." There are no separate paragraphs inspired
with such rhetorical animation as those in " Barnaby
nudge," where the murderer is scared by the ringing
of the alarm-bell in the mansion of Mr. Hare-
dale, or where the populace are casting fresh
fuel before the burning doors of Newgate. "Dombey
and Son" has, no Dick Swiveller, like the " Old Cu-
riosity Shop ; ' no Brothers Cheeryble, like " Nicholas
Nickleby ;" no Sarey Gamp or Seth Pecksniff, like
" Martin Chuzzlewit." It is inferior to " Pick-
wick" in point of sustained drollery, and to
" Oliver Twist" in dramatic passion, and epic
completeness. In the three particulars already
specified, however, " Dombey and Son" sur-
passes every one of the preceding compositions of
Mr. Dickens; and in several of the minor parts it is