as usher in a Yorkshire school kept by one Squeers.  But the young fellow’s gorge rises at the sickening cruelty exercised in the school, and he leaves it, having first beaten Mr. Squeers,—­leaves it followed by a poor shattered creature called Smike.  Meanwhile Ralph, the usurer, befriends his sister-in-law and niece after his own fashion, and tries to use the latter’s beauty in furtherance of his trade as a money-lender.  Nicholas discovers his plots, frustrates all his schemes, rescues, and ultimately marries, a young lady who had been immeshed in one of them; and Ralph, at last, utterly beaten, commits suicide on finding that Smike, through whom he had been endeavouring all through to injure Nicholas, and who is now dead, was his own son.  Such are the book’s dry bones, its skeleton, which one is almost ashamed to expose thus nakedly.  For the beauty of these novels lies not at all in the plot; it is in the incidents, situations, characters.  And with beauty of this kind how richly dowered is “Nicholas Nickleby”!  Take the characters alone.  What lavish profusion of humour in the theatrical group that clusters round Mr. Vincent Crummles, the country manager; and in the Squeers family too; and in the little shop-world of Mrs. Mantalini, the fashionable dressmaker; and in Cheeryble Brothers, the golden-hearted old merchants who take Nicholas into their counting-house.  Then for single characters commend me to Mrs. Nickleby, whose logic, which some cynics would call feminine, is positively sublime in its want of coherence; and to John Browdie, the honest Yorkshire cornfactor, as good a fellow almost as Dandie Dinmont, the Border yeoman whom Scott made immortal.  The high-life personages are far less successful.  Dickens had small gift that way, and seldom succeeded in his society pictures.  Nor, if the truth must be told, do I greatly care for the description of the duel between Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht, though it was evidently very much admired at the time, and is quoted, as a favourable specimen of Dickens’ style, in Charles Knight’s “Half-hours with the Best Authors.”  The writing is a little too tall.  It lacks simplicity, as is sometimes the case with Dickens, when he wants to be particularly impressive.

And this leads me, by a kind of natural sequence, to what I have to say about his next book, “The Old Curiosity Shop;” for here, again, though in a very much more marked degree, I fear I shall have to run counter to a popular opinion.

But first a word as to the circumstances under which the book was published.  Casting about, after the conclusion of “Nicholas Nickleby,” for further literary ventures, Dickens came to the conclusion that the public must be getting tired of his stories in monthly parts.  It occurred to him that a weekly periodical, somewhat after the manner of Addison’s Spectator or Goldsmith’s Bee, and containing essays, stories, and miscellaneous papers,—­to be written mainly, but not entirely,