eward from the tavern,
the portly knight leading the revellers like a three-decker a line of
frigates, they are encountered by Dogberry, who summons them to stand
and answer to the watch as they are honest men. If Mr. Dickens's
characters were gathered together, they would constitute a town
populous enough to send a representative to Parliament. Let us enter.
The style of architecture is unparalleled. There is an individuality
about the buildings. In some obscure way they remind one of human
faces. There are houses sly-looking, houses wicked-looking, houses
pompous-looking. Heaven bless us! what a rakish pump! what a
self-important town-hall! what a hard-hearted prison! The dead walls
are covered with advertisements of Mr. Sleary's circus. Newman Noggs
comes shambling along. Mr. and the Misses Pecksniff come sailing down
the sunny side of the street. Miss Mercy's parasol is gay; papa's
neck-cloth is white, and terribly starched. Dick Swiveller leans
against a wall, his hands in his pockets, a primrose held between his
teeth, contemplating the opera of Punch and Judy, which is being
conducted under the management of Messrs. Codlings and Short. You turn
a corner and you meet the coffin of little Paul Dombey borne along.
Who would have thought of encountering a funeral in this place? In the
afternoon you hear the rich tones of the organ from Miss La Creevy's
first floor, for Tom Pinch has gone to live there now, and as you know
all the people as you know your own brothers and sisters, and
consequently require no letters of introduction, you go up and talk
with the dear old fellow about all his friends and your friends, and
towards evening he takes your arm, and you walk out to see poor Nelly's
grave--a place which he visits often, and which he dresses with flowers
with his own hands. I know this is the idlest dreaming, but all of us
have a sympathy with the creatures of the drama and the novel. Around
the hardest cark and toil lies the imaginative world of the poets and
romancists, and thither we sometimes escape to snatch a mouthful of
serener air. There our best lost feelings have taken a human shape.
We suppose that boyhood with its impulses and enthusiasms has subsided
with the gray cynical man whom we have known these many years. Not a
bit of it. It has escaped into the world of the poet, and walks a
love-flushed Romeo in immortal youth. We suppose that the Mary of
fifty years since, the rose-bud of