sequel of this tragic incident of the
bereavement of the Peggottys, came David's love passages with Dora, and
his social unbendings with Mr. Micawber. Regaling the latter inimitable
personage, and his equally inimitable wife, together with David's old
schoolfellow, Tradelles, on a banquet of boiled leg of mutton, very red
inside and very pale outside, as well as upon a delusive pigeon-pie,
the crust of which was like a disappointing phrenological head, "full of
lumps and bumps, with nothing particular underneath," David afforded us
the opportunity of realising, within a very brief interval, something
at least of the abundant humour associated with Mrs. Micawber's worldly
wisdom, and Mr. Micawber's ostentatious impecuniosity. A word, that
last, it always seems to us--describing poverty, as it does, with such
an air of pomp--especially provided beforehand for Mr. Micawber (out of
a prophetic anticipation or foreknowledge of him) by the dictionary.

The mere opening of the evening's entertainment at David Copperfield's
chambers on this occasion, enabled the Humorist to elicit preliminary
roars of laughter from his audience by his very manner of saying, with a
deliciously ridiculous prolongation of the liquid consonant forming the
initial of the last word--"As to Mrs. Micawber, I don't know whether it
was the effect of the cap, or the lavender water, or the phis, or the
fire, or the wax-candles, but she came out of my room comparatively
speaking l-l-lovely!"

As deliciously ridiculous was the whole scene between Dora and David,
where the latter, at length, takes courage to make his proposal--"Jip
barking madly all the time "--Dora crying the while and trembling.
David's eloquence increasing, the more he raved, the more Jip
barked--each, in his own way, getting more mad every moment! Even when
they had got married by licence, "the Archbishop of Canterbury invoking
a blessing, and doing it as cheap as it could possibly be expected,"
their domestic experiences were sources of unbounded merriment.

As, for example, in connection with their servant girl's cousin in the
Life Guards, "with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon
shadow of somebody else." Finally, closing the whole of this ingenious
epitome of the original narrative, came that grand and wonderfully
realistic description of the stupendous storm upon the beach at
Yarmouth, upon the extraordinary power of which as a piece of
declamation we have already at s