much loved by
us as the old doctor himself. What a noble, divine power of genius this
is, which, passing from the poet into his reader's soul, mingles with
it, and there engenders, as it were, real creatures; which is as strong
as history, which creates beings that take their place besides nature's
own. All that we know of Don Quixote or Louis XIV we got to know in the
same way--out of a book. I declare I love Sir Roger de Coverley quite as
much as Izaak Walton, and have just as clear a consciousness of the
looks, voice, habit, and manner of being of the one as of the other.

And so with regard to this question of futurity; if any benevolent being
of the present age is imbued with a desire to know what his
great-great-grandchild will think of this or that author--of Mr. Dickens
especially, whose claims to fame have raised the question--the only way to
settle it is by the ordinary historic method. Did not your
great-great-grandfather love and delight in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?
Have they lost their vitality by their age? Don't they move laughter and
awaken affection now as three hundred years ago? And so with Don Pickwick
and Sancho Weller, if their gentle humours and kindly wit, and hearty
benevolent natures, touch us and convince us, as it were, now, why should
they not exist for our children as well as for us, and make the
twenty-fifth century happy, as they have the nineteenth? Let Snarl console
himself, then, as to the future.

As for the _Christmas Carol_, or any other book of a like nature which
the public takes upon itself to criticise, the individual critic had
quite best hold his peace. One remembers what Buonaparte replied to some
Austrian critics, of much correctness and acumen, who doubted about
acknowledging the French republic. I do not mean that the _Christmas
Carol_ is quite as brilliant or self-evident as the sun at noonday; but
it is so spread over England by this time, that no sceptic, no _Fraser's
Magazine_,--no, not even the godlike and ancient _Quarterly_ itself
(venerable, Saturnian, big-wigged dynasty!) could review it down.
"Unhappy people! deluded race!" One hears the cauliflowered god exclaim,
mournfully shaking the powder out of his ambrosial curls, "What strange
new folly is this? What new deity do you worship? Know ye what ye do?
Know ye that your new idol hath little Latin and less Greek? Know ye
that he has never tasted the birch at Eton, nor trodden the flags of
Carfax, nor paced t