by Boz.”  Sir Arthur Helps, speaking of Dickens, just after Dickens’ death,[5] said, “His powers of observation were almost unrivalled....  Indeed, I have said to myself when I have been with him, he sees and observes nine facts for any two that I see and observe.”  This particular faculty is, I think, almost as clearly discernible in the “Sketches” as in the author’s later and greater works.  London—­its sins and sorrows, its gaieties and amusements, its suburban gentilities, and central squalor, the aspects of its streets, and the humours of the dingier classes among its inhabitants,—­all this had certainly never been so seen and described before.  The power of exact minute delineation lavished upon the picture is admirable.  Again, the dialogue in the dramatic parts is natural, well-conducted, characteristic, and so used as to help, not impede, the narrative.  The speech, for instance, of Mr. Bung, the broker’s man, is a piece of very good Dickens.  Of course there is humour, and very excellent fooling some of it is; and equally, of course, there is pathos, and some of that is not bad.  Do I mean at all that this earlier work stands on the same level of excellence as the masterpieces of the writer?  Clearly not.  It were absurd to expect the stripling, half-furtively coming forward, first without a name at all, and then under the pseudonym of Boz,[6] to write with the superb practised ease and mastery of the Charles Dickens who penned “David Copperfield.”  By dint of doing blacksmith’s work, says the French proverb, one becomes a blacksmith.  The artist, like the handicraftsman, must learn his art.  Much in the “Sketches” betrays inexperience; or, perhaps, it would be more just to say, comparative clumsiness of hand.  The descriptions, graphic as they undoubtedly are, lack for the most part the final imaginative touch; the kind of inbreathing of life which afterwards gave such individual charm to Dickens’ word-painting.  The humour is more obvious, less delicate, turns too readily on the claim of the elderly spinster to be considered young, and the desire of all spinsters to get married.  The pathos is often spoilt by over-emphasis and declamation.  It lacks simplicity.

For the “Sketches” published in The Old Monthly Magazine, Dickens got nothing, beyond the pleasure of seeing himself in print.  The Chronicle treated him somewhat more liberally, and, on his application, increased his salary, giving him, in view of his original contributions, seven guineas a week, instead of the five guineas which he had been drawing as a reporter.  Not a particularly brilliant augmentation, perhaps, and one at which he must often have smiled in after years, when his pen was dropping gold as well as ink.  Still, the addition to his income was substantial, and the son of John Dickens must always, I imagine, have been in special need of money.  Moreover the circumstances of the next few months would render any increased earnings doubly pleasant.  For Dickens was shortly