marshal the shades of
true-hearted, noble Nell, unhappy Smike, little Paul Dombey, world
abandoned Joe, and compare them with the Wellers--father and son, Mr.
Jingle, Tracy Tupman, Bob Sawyer, and the spectacled but essentially
owlish founder of the "Pickwick Club." All this we fancy has been done
in another place; our task is altogether of a simpler character. We have
to trace the connection which subsisted between the artist and author;
to show how this book--the creation of a writer in the spring-time of
his genius--the essence of fun, the unfailing source of merriment to
countless readers past, present, and to come, came to be associated with
the memory of a terrible and still incomprehensible tragedy.

We have seen that, contrary to his own wishes, Seymour had yielded to
Charles Dickens' suggestion, or rather condition, that the illustrations
should grow out of the text; but he does not seem to have abandoned (so
far as we can judge) all idea of having a hand in the management of the
story, and he never for one instant contemplated interference on the
part of the author with any one of his own designs. If we are to believe
his friends (and their testimony seems to us distinctly valuable in
this place), he was extremely angry at the introduction into the plot of
the "Stroller's Tale," and we may therefore fancy the spirit in which he
would receive Charles Dickens' intimation, conveyed to him in the same
manner that he afterwards communicated to Cruikshank his disapproval of
the last etching in "Oliver Twist," that he objected to that etching "as
not quite _his_ [Dickens'] idea;" that he wished "to have it as complete
as possible, and would feel personally obliged if he would make another
drawing." The letter (on the whole a kindly one) has been set out
elsewhere,[105] and there is no occasion to repeat it here. What other
causes of irritation existed will never be known. All that is still
known is, that he executed a fresh design and handed it over to Dickens
at the time appointed; that he went home and destroyed nearly all the
correspondence relating to the subject of "Pickwick"; that he executed a
drawing for a wood-engraver named John Jackson,[106] and delivered it
himself on the evening of the 20th of April, 1836; that he then returned
to his house in King Street, Islington, and committed self-destruction.
He left behind him an unfinished drawing for "Figaro in London," which
afterwards appeared (in the state in