s
slight sketch by the simple force of its humorous delivery. "Mr. Chops,
the Dwarf," as, indeed, was only befitting, was the smallest of all the
Readings. The simple little air that so caught the dreamer's fancy, when
played upon the harp by Scrooge's niece by marriage, is described after
all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been
intrinsically "a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in
two minutes." Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in
half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through
these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by
Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been
altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything
but attractive, relating, as it did, merely to the escapade of a
monstrosity. The surroundings are ignoble, the language is illiterate,
the narrative from first to last is characterised by its grotesque
extravagance. Yet the whole is presented to view in so utterly ludicrous
an aspect, that one needs must laugh just as surely as one listened.
Turning over the leaves now, and recalling to mind the hilarity they
used to excite even among the least impressionable audience whenever
they were fluttered (there are not a dozen of them altogether) on
the familiar reading-desk, one marvels over the success of such an
exceedingly small oddity as over the remembrance, let us say, of the
brilliant performance of a fantasia on the jew's-harp by Rubenstein.

Nevertheless, slight though it is, the limning all through has touches
of the most comic suggestiveness. Magsman's account of the show-house
during his occupancy is sufficiently absurd to begin with--"the picter
of the giant who was himself the heighth of the house," being run up
with a line and pulley to a pole on the roof till "his 'ed was coeval
with the parapet;" the picter of the child of the British Planter
seized by two Boa Constrictors, "not that we never had no child, nor
no Constrictors either;" similarly, the picter of the Wild Ass of the
Prairies, "not that _we_ never had no wild asses, nor wouldn't have had
'em at a gift." And to crown all, the picter of the Dwarf--who was "a
uncommon small man, he really was. Certainly not so small as he was made
out to be; but where _is_ your Dwarf as is?" A picter "like him, too
considering, with George the Fourth, in such a state of astonishment
at him as his Majesty couldn't w