ore to make clear to the intelligent reader
that a new and original genius in the walk of Smollett and Fielding had
arisen in England.

I do not, for reasons to be hereafter stated, think the _Pickwick
Papers_ comparable to the later books; but, apart from the new vein of
humor it opened, its wonderful freshness and its unflagging animal
spirits, it has two characters that will probably continue to attract to
it an unfading popularity. Its pre-eminent achievement is of course Sam
Weller,--one of those people that take their place among the supreme
successes of fiction, as one that nobody ever saw but everybody
recognizes, at once perfectly natural and intensely original. Who is
there that has ever thought him tedious? Who is so familiar with him as
not still to be finding something new in him? Who is so amazed by his
inexhaustible resources, or so amused by his inextinguishable laughter,
as to doubt of his being as ordinary and perfect a reality,
nevertheless, as anything in the London streets? When indeed the relish
has been dulled that makes such humor natural and appreciable, and not
his native fun only, his ready and rich illustration, his imperturbable
self-possession, but his devotion to his master, his chivalry and his
gallantry, are no longer discovered, or believed no longer to exist, in
the ranks of life to which he belongs, it will be worse for all of us
than for the fame of his creator. Nor, when faith is lost in that
possible combination of eccentricities and benevolences, shrewdness and
simplicity, good sense and folly, all that suggests the ludicrous and
nothing that suggests contempt for it, which form the delightful oddity
of Pickwick, will the mistake committed be one merely of critical
misjudgment. But of this there is small fear. Sam Weller and Mr.
Pickwick are the Sancho and the Quixote of Londoners, and as little
likely to pass away as the old city itself.

Dickens was very fond of riding in these early years, and there was no
recreation he so much indulged, or with such profit to himself, in the
intervals of his hardest work. I was his companion oftener than I could
well afford the time for, the distances being great and nothing else to
be done for the day; but when a note would unexpectedly arrive while I
knew him to be hunted hard by one of his printers, telling me he had
been sticking to work so closely that he must have rest, and, by way of
getting it, proposing we should start together that