and strong, will stand out in our thoughts, fresh and full coloured, for an indefinite time.  Scott’s “Guy Mannering” is a well-constructed story.  The plot is deftly laid, the events are prepared for with a cunning hand; the coincidences are so arranged as to be made to look as probable as may be.  Yet we remember and love the book, not for such excellences as these, but for Dandie Dinmont, the Border farmer, and Pleydell, the Edinburgh advocate, and Meg Merrilies, the gipsy.  The book’s life is in its flesh and blood, not in its plot.  And the same is true of Dickens’ novels.  He crowds them so full of human creatures, each with its own individuality and character, that we have no care for more than just as much story as may serve to show them struggling, joying, sorrowing, loving.  If the incidents will do this for us we are satisfied.  It is not necessary that those incidents should be made to go through cunning evolutions to a definite end.  Each is admirable in itself, and admirably adapted to its immediate purpose.  That should more than suffice.

And Dickens sometimes succeeds in reaching a higher unity than that of mere plot.  He takes one central idea, and makes of it the soul of his novel, animating and vivifying every part.  That central idea in “Martin Chuzzlewit” is the influence of selfishness.  The Chuzzlewits are a selfish race.  Old Martin is selfish; and so, with many good qualities and possibilities of better things, is his grandson, young Martin.  The other branch of the family, Anthony Chuzzlewit and his son Jonas, are much worse.  The latter especially is a horrible creature.  Brought up to think of nothing except his own interests and the main chance, he is only saved by an accident from the crime of parricide, and afterwards commits a murder and poisons himself.  As his career is one of terrible descent, so young Martin’s is one of gradual regeneration from his besetting weakness.  He falls in love with his cousin Mary—­the only unselfish member of the family, by the bye—­and quarrels about this love affair with his grandfather, and so passes into the hard school of adversity.  There he learns much.  Specially valuable is the teaching which he gets as a settler in the swampy backwoods of the United States in company with Mark Tapley, jolliest and most helpful of men.  On his return, he finds his grandfather seemingly under the influence of Pecksniff, the hypocrite, the English Tartuffe.  But that, as I have already mentioned, is only a ruse.  Old Martin is deceiving Pecksniff, who in due time receives the reward of his deeds, and all ends happily for those who deserve happiness.  Such is something like a bare outline of the story, with the beauty eliminated.  For what makes its interest, we must go further, to the household of Pecksniff with his two daughters, Charity and Mercy, and Tom Pinch, whose beautiful, unselfish character stands so in contrast to that of the grasping self-seekers by whom he is surrounded; we must study young Martin