reporter, and other vicissitudes of his own life. In it there is an attack upon the system of model prisons, but the chief interest is found in his wonderful portraitures of varied and opposite characters-the Peggottys, Steerforth, the inimitable Micawber, Betsy Trotwood, Agnes, the lovely and lov able, Mr. Dick, with such noble method in his madness, Dora, the child-wife, the simple Traddles and Uriah Heep, the 'umble intriguer and villain.

Bleak House is a tremendous onslaught upon the chancery system, and is said to have caused a modification of it; his knowledge of law gave him the power of an expert in detailing and dissecting its enormities.

Little Dorrit presents the heartlessness of society, and is, besides, a full and fearful picture of the system of imprisonment for debt. For variety, power and pathos it is one of his best efforts.

A Tale of Two Cities is a gloomy but vivid story of the French Revolution which has by no means the popularity of his other works.

In Hard Times, a shorter story, he has shown the evil consequences of a hard, statistical, cramming education in which the sympathies are repressed and the mind is made a practical machine. The failure of Gradgrind has warned many a parent from imitating him.

Great Expectations failed to fulfil the promise of the name, but Joe Gargery is as original a character as any he had drawn.

His last completed story is Our Mutual Friend, which, although unequal to his best novels, has still original characters and strik

ing scenes. The rage for rising in the social scale ruins the Veneerings, and Podsnappery is a well-chosen name for the heartless dogmatism which rules in English society.

Besides these splendid works, we must mention the delight he has given and the good he has done in expanding individual and public charity by his exquisite Christmas stories, of which The Chimes, The Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth are the best.

His dramatic power has been fully illustrated by the ready adaptations of his novels to the stage; they are, indeed, in scenes, personages, costume and interlocution, dramas in all except the form, and he himself was an admirable actor.

Dickens's tenderness is touching, and his pathos at once excites our sympathy. He does not tell us to feel or to weep, but he shows us scenes, like those in the life of Smike and in the sufferings and death of Little Nell, which so simply appeal to the heart that we are for the time forgetful of the wand which conjures them before us.

Dickens is bold in the advocacy of truth and in denouncing error; he is the champion of honest poverty; he is the foe of class pretension and oppression; he is the friend of friendless children, the reformer of those whom society has made vagrants. Without many clear assertions of Christian doctrine, but with no negation of it, he believes in doing good for its own sake-in self-denial, in the rewards which Virtue gives herself. His faults are few and venial. His merry life smacks too much of the practical joke and the punch-bowl; he denounces cant in the self-appointed ministers of the gospel, but he is not careful to draw contrasted pictures

of good pastors. His opinion seems to be based upon a human perfectibility. But for rare pictures of real life he has never been surpassed, and he has instructed an age concerning itself wisely, originally and usefully. He has the simplicity of Goldsmith and the truth to nature of Fielding and Smollett without a spice of sentimentalism or of impurity; he has brought the art of prose fiction to its highest point, and he has left no worthy successor. He lived for years separated from his wife on the ground of incompatibility, and during his later years at Gadshill, twenty miles from London, to avoid the dissipations and drafts upon his time in that city.

In 1868, Dickens again visited America to read portions of his own works. He was well received by the public, but society had learned its lesson on his former visit, and he was not overwhelmed with a hospitality he had so signally failed to appreciate. And if we had learned better, he had vastly improved the genius had become a gentleman. His readings were a great pecuniary success, and at their close he made an amend which was graceful and proper; so that when he departed from our shores his former errors were fully condoned, and he left an admiring hemisphere behind him.

In the glow of health, and while writing, in serial numbers, a very promising novel entitled The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he was struck by apoplexy, in June, 1870, and in a few hours was dead. England has hardly experienced a greater loss. All classes of men mourned when he was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the Poets' Corner, among illustrious writers-a prose-poet none of whom has a larger fame than he,

a historian of his time of greater value to society than any who distinctively bear the title. His characters are drawn from life his own experience is found in Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield; Micawber is a caricature of his own father; Traddles is said to represent his friend Talfourd; Skimpole is supposed to be an original likeness of Leigh Hunt; and William and Daniel Grant, of Manchester, were the originals of the Brothers Cheeryble.

HENRY COPPÉE.

A RATTLING DAY'S SPORT.

WE

E had a rattling day's sport with the Quorley hounds. We found a fox at Maidenwood, and, in spite of all his trembling endeavors to skulk away under the thickets, we drove him despairingly out into the open. What a beating and throbbing of heart there must have been meanwhile under that red hairy bosom, what an agony of terror and fluttering doubt, as the hunted thing crept quietly from tunnel to tunnel of matted branches where the gorse was thickest! but we were not going to draw a blank and be baulked of our fun; so we worried him out at last, palpitating and panting, on to Wokey Common. There he ran hard for dear life. He knew what it meant well-that we could see-for it was by no means the first time he had been hunted down by a posse of chivvying, scurrying men and beasts, one poor weak bit of defenceless vermin against the whole mounted country-side. For a moment, as we passed Banly-hanger, a gleam of hope rose in the wretched creature's mind, for he headed toward the quarries and tried to hide in a trusty

cranny among the loose rocks and brambles. But we soon made it too hot for him, and he burst out again, this time with knocking knees and loosening sinews, I doubt not, and made away at a rattling pace for the corner across a nice bit of soft turf. It was too fast to live under, and he got clean off at last to ground in the Park. As he slipped down, exhausted and terrified, into the secure retreat he heard the huntsmen holloaing in the distance, and lay crouching in an ecstasy of deadly fear while we proceeded to draw the covert. His shelter was but a poor one, and we might have managed to pull him out and kill him. It was an awful moment of suspense. For three minutes he held his breath tight and felt his heart bursting silently within him, and then, O heaven! the noise began to die away gradually, and he could relax the tension of his muscles a little and try to recover the long-drawn breath in his aching sides. But he would not soon get his quivering limbs quiet again, I warrant, nor slake his feverish tongue for some hours to come. We all agreed he had shown capital sport; and, after all, he was a well-tried old dog, and we can have another nailing run out of him another day.

Turning aside, we soon found again in a spinney under Thorneyhaugh. Hounds showed at once that they were holding a good scent another wretched creature was spotted, and doomed for at least forty minutes of abject terror and unspeakable dismay. He gave us an excellent spin across Whittingham Downs-a beautiful stretch of moorlike grassy country so lovely (for us) in the bright sunshine-and headed away bravely toward Colbury. About two hun

dred yards away from it, however, he heard the hounds gaining on him from behind; his faltering legs began to give way beneath him ; the deep pain in his side grew unendurable. With a sickening consciousness that all was over, and with a terrible phantasmagoria of those fierce-mouthed, yelping, pitiless dogs floating vaguely before his distracted eyes, he unconsciously yielded a little. The pace fell off, and the hounds bowled him over in the open.

One fox worried to earth and one run till he almost dropped with exhaustion were not quite fun enough, however, for a whole day's sportsmanlike amusement; so we turned elsewhere to look for more. There are always plenty of foxes there, thanks to the squire's care in preserving those dangerous vermin, the necessity for whose extermination long formed one chief excuse for our noble pastime, though nowadays, I must admit, we have been forced to get frankly beyond that little piece of transparent hypocrisy. Here a fox made tracks cleverly across the moss and straight into Worley, on past Beckley Bridge, and away like lightning to the plantation at Heppleburn. Here there was a considerable check, and the poor breathless brute, hiding, as we afterward discovered, among the sheltering crags on the hillside, and trying to save his life in an open sewer, hoped for ten full minutes that his head was spared for one more day. However, we were not to be baffled, and with careful scenting the hounds soon tracked him down and worked up to him among the rubble. For a while the unhappy jaded wretch dodged them. sharply from point to point, but he was dead beat-a mere mass of shaking, living pulp without power to run another quarter