ainly unintelligible and largely
uninteresting if it had been successfully disguised. But though John
Harmon or Rokesmith was never intended to be merely a man of mystery, it
is not quite so easy to say what he was intended to be. Bella is a
possible and pretty sketch. Mrs. Wilfer, her mother, is an entirely
impossible and entirely delightful one. Miss Podsnap is not only
excellent, she is to a healthy taste positively attractive; there is a
real suggestion in her of the fact that humility is akin to truth, even
when humility takes its more comic form of shyness. There is not in all
literature a more human _cri de coeur_ than that with which Georgiana
Podsnap receives the information that a young man has professed himself
to be attracted by her--"Oh what a Fool he must be!"

Two other figures require praise, though they are in the more tragic
manner which Dickens touched from time to time in his later period.
Bradley Headstone is really a successful villain; so successful that he
fully captures our sympathies. Also there is something original in the
very conception. It was a new notion to add to the villains of fiction,
whose thoughts go quickly, this villain whose thoughts go slow but sure;
and it was a new notion to combine a deadly criminality not with high
life or the slums (the usual haunts for villains) but with the laborious
respectability of the lower, middle classes. The other good conception
is the boy, Bradley Headstone's pupil, with his dull, inexhaustible
egoism, his pert, unconscious cruelty, and the strict decorum and
incredible baseness of his views of life. It is singular that Dickens,
who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have
been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of modern popular
education, should nevertheless have seen so clearly this potential evil
in the mere educationalism of our time--the fact that merely educating
the democracy may easily mean setting to work to despoil it of all the
democratic virtues. It is better to be Lizzie Hexam and not know how to
read and write than to be Charlie Hexam and not know how to appreciate
Lizzie Hexam. It is not only necessary that the democracy should be
taught; it is also necessary that the democracy should be taught
democracy. Otherwise it will certainly fall a victim to that
snobbishness and system of worldly standards which is the most natural
and easy of all the forms of human corruption. This is one of the m