DAVID COPPERFIELD.

The sea-beach at Yarmouth formed both the opening and the closing scene
of this Reading, in six chapters, from "David Copperfield." In its
varied portraiture of character and in the wonderful descriptive
power marking its conclusion, it was one of the most interesting and
impressive of the whole series in its delivery. Through it, we renewed
our acquaintance more vividly than ever with handsome, curry-headed,
reckless, heartless Steerforth! With poor, lone, lorn Mrs. Gummidge,
not only when everythink about her went contrairy, but when her better
nature gushed forth under the great calamity befalling her benefactor.
With pretty little Emily, and bewitching little Dora. With Mr. Micawber,
his shirt-collar, his eye-glass, the condescending roll in his voice,
and his intermittent bursts of confidence. With Mrs. Micawber, who,
as the highest praise we can bestow upon her, is quite worthy of her
husband, and who is always, it will be remembered, so impassioned in her
declaration that, come what may, she never _will_ desert Mr. Micawber!
With Traddles, and his irrepressible hair, even a love-lock from which
had to be kept down by Sophy's preservation of it in a clasped locket!
With Mr. Peggotty, in fine, who, in his tender love for his niece, is,
according to his own account, "not to-look at, but to think on," nothing
less than a babby in the form of a great sea Porkypine! Remembering the
other originals, crowding the pages of the story in its integrity, how
one would have liked to have seen even a few more of them impersonated
by the protean Novelist! That "most wonderful woman in the world," Aunt
Betsey, for example; or that most laconic of carriers, Mr. Barkis; or,
to name yet one other, Uriah Heep, that reddest and most writhing of
rascally attornies. As it was, however, there were abundant realizations
within the narrow compass of this Reading of the principal persons
introduced in the autobiography of David Copperfield. The most loveable,
by the way, of all the young heroes portrayed in the Dickens' Gallery
was there, to begin with, for example--the peculiar loveableness
of David being indicated as plainly as by any means through the
extraordinary variety of pet names given to him by one or another in the
course of the narrative. For, was he not the "Daisy" of Steerforth, the
"Doady" of Dora, the "Trotwood" of Aunt Betsy, and the "Mas'r Davy" of
the Yarmouth boatmen, just as surely as he was the "Mr.