rally by night," her Majesty's revenues being seldom collected in
that happy valley, its rents being pronounced dubious, and its water
communication described as "frequently cut off," we found in respect to
the whole picture thus lightly-sketched in, that age did not wither nor
custom stale its infinite comicality.

It was when the familiar personages of the story were, one after
another, introduced upon the scene, however, that the broad Pickwickian
humour of it all began in earnest to be realised. After we had listened
with chuckling enjoyment to the ludicrously minute account given of the
elaborate preparations made for the reception of the visitors, even in
the approaches to Mr. Bob Sawyer's apartment, down to the mention of the
kitchen candle with a long snuff, that "burnt cheerfully on the ledge of
the staircase window," we had graphically rendered the memorable scene
between poor, dejected Bob and his little spitfire of a landlady, Mrs.
Raddle. _So_ dejected and generally suppressed was Bob in the Reading,
however, that we should hardly have recognised that very archetype
of the whole _genus_ of rollicking Medical Students, as originally
described in the pages of Pickwick, where he is depicted as attired
in "a coarse blue coat, which, without being either a great-coat or a
surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both," having about him
that sort of slovenly smartness and swaggering gait peculiar to young
gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, and shout and scream in the
same by night, calling waiters by their Christian names, and altogether
bearing a resemblance upon the whole to something like a dissipated
Robinson Crusoe. Habited, Bob still doubtless was, in the plaid trousers
and the large, rough coat and double-breasted waistcoat, but as for the
"swaggering gait" just mentioned not a vestige of it remained. Nor could
that be wondered at, indeed, for an instant, beholding and hearing, as
we did, the shrill ferocity with which Mrs. Raddle had it out with him
about the rent immediately before the arrival of his guests.

It is one of the distinctive peculiarities of Charles Dickens as a
humorous Novelist, that the cream or quintessence of a jest is very
often given by him quite casually in a parenthesis. It was equally
distinctive of his peculiarities as a Reader, that the especial charm
of his drollery was often conveyed by the merest aside. Thus it was with
him in reference to Mrs. Raddle's "confoun