The Sun.
London, England, 1866-04-25 00:00:00

vividly !) by her every look and gesture. There's
her dumb lover, afterwards her husband ! And
—to crown all, to perfect all, to bring all at the
very last to one exquisite conclusion—there's the
little child—child of those two dumb parents—the
little child who comes clambering with a light tread
up the steps of the cart, just after Doctor Marigold
has been regaling himself with a dinner off
that wonderful beefsteak-pudding of his own manu-
facture, pronounced by himself to be a pudding
to put a man in good humour with everything but
the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat—there's
thebright little comely girl with large dark eyes,
the tiny creature in her mite of a straw hat—at
the first sound of• whose pretty voice greeting him,
all the poor tender-hearted Uileap Jack's fears as
to her hereditary dumbness get blissfully scattered
to the winds upon the instant. " Grandfather !"
"Ah, my God!" I cries out, "She can speak!"

Immediately after which rapturous cry of de-
light from the lips of the itinerant Cheap Jack,
the Reading of " Doctor Marigold" comes almost
abruptly to a conclusion. Insomuch so that—before
the echo of that cry, last evening, had well ceased
ringing upon the ears and hearts of the im-
mense audience assembled there in the Hall—an
audience that until then had been listening to the
closing passages of the Monologue with breathless
attention—Mr. Dickens had disappeared from the
platform. The spell was still there, but the
magician had vanished.
Afterwards—when an interval of but a very few
minutes had been as usual allowed to elapse—Mr.
Dickens, although suffering yesterday from what
we fear must have been to himself, at intervals, a
very distressing hoarseness, crowned the evening's
entertainment as radiantly as ever with his far-
famed and irresistibly-humorous record of " The
Trial from Pickwick." Here, in his rendering of
that most famous chapter of all from the most
famous of all his books—about the most laughter-
moving and hilarious book surely that ever was
penned•—the twofold marvel is the rapidity of his
facial and vocal transformations, coupled with the
astonishing number and diversity of his impersona-
tions, while reading it. From the testy little Judge
upon the Bench, Mr. Justice Stareleigh, at one mo-
ment looking about him with an inflamed glare
of the eye, half suspicion, half indignation, at an-
other waking up from a doze to make an elaborately
suppositious note with a pen that has no ink in it !
To Mr. Pickwick—that " angel in tights," accord-
ing to Sam's preposterously felicitous description of
him—even, we say, to that great man who, although
no more than casually referred to during the Read-
ing, seems, somehow, to start before us, then, upon
the instant, arrayed, so to speak, in all his attributes,
including among these, we might also say, his very
gaiters and barnacles, so complete is our realisa-
tion of his bodily presence while listening to this
mere momentary mention of himself by Mr.
Dickens ! From Sam Weller, best of all the wit-
nesses, to Mr. Winkle, indubitably and doubly
among them all the very worst, but drollest.
From garrulous little Mrs. Cluppins (with her
domestic confidences uttered in open court)

—that worthy precursor of " Anastasia Piper,
gentlemen," afterwards introduced to our notice at
the inquest in Bleak House—to Master Barden in his
skeleton-suit and sugarloaf -buttons, fearfully expec-
tant of a summons to instant execution, as he stands
there conspicuously within every one's view upon
the floor of the court-house ! Besides all of whom,

there are Sergeant Buzifuz and Sergeant Snubbin,
together with Mr. Skimpin and Mr. Phunkey the
juniors. To say nothing of the whole assembled
bar with its astonishing and pleasing variety
of nose and whisker. There are Messrs. Dod-
son and Fogg, the rascally attorneys for
the plaintiff. There is little Mr. Perker, the
solicitor for the defendant. There is Old Weller

—that gloriouspld Weller, of whom, by the way,
we are almost inclined to speak as the very finest
character of all in the book—bawling: gutturally
from the gallery, " Quite right, Sammy, quite
right—put it down a we, my Lord!" One after
another, turn by turn, as the trial proceeds, we
seem to see and hear these people to the very
life, as if we were there actually in the court, instead
of merely listening to an account of the proceedings
recorded in the great case of Bardell v. Pickwick.
It is a wonderful gift, indeed, this marvellous and
wholely exceptional capability on the part of our
great Author to realize thus magically by his look
and voice to the eye and ear of such as may be there
attentively watching him and listening to him, those
purely hypothetical creatures of his imagination,
which his pen, like a wizard's wand (as it is), has
already conjured into life upon his pictured page.
it is a gift, however, that, in the very midst of our
marvelling over it, seems to explain to us in some
measure how it comes to pass, after all, that Charles
Dickens is so wonderfully realistic in his capacity as
a Novelist. The obvious truth being, that he, first
of all, realizes his dreamings so intensely to himself,
that when hT, afterwards comes to relate them to us,
whether by written or by spoken words, they appear
to be far more like actual events and living people
than any mere incidents and creatures born of his
imagination.