se intellect is immensely
superior to her station in life. That's a woman who observes and
reflects in a wonderful manner." Mr. Mould becomes so strongly impressed
at last with a sense of her exceptional merits, that in a deliciously
ludicrous outburst of professional generosity he caps the climax of his
eulogium by observing, "She's the sort of woman, now, that one would
almost feel disposed to bury for nothing--and do it neatly, too!"
Thoroughly akin, by the way, to which exceedingly questionable
expression of goodwill on the part of Mr. Mould, is Mrs. Gamp's equally
confiding outburst of philanthropy from _her_ point of view, where she
remarks--of course to her familiar, as Socrates when communing with his
Daemon--"'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'don't name the charge, for if I
could afford to lay my fellow-creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly
do it, sich is the love I bears 'em.'"

A benevolent unbosoming, or self-revelation, that last, on the part of
Mrs. Gamp, so astoundingly outspoken of its kind, that it forces upon
one, in regard to her whole character, the almost inevitable
reflection that her grotesque and inexhaustible humour, like Falstaff's
irrepressible and exhilarating wit, redeems what would be otherwise
in itself utterly irredeemable. For, as commentators have remarked, in
regard to Shakspere's Fat Knight, that Sir John is an unwieldy mass
of every conceivable bad quality, being, among other things, a liar,
a coward, a drunkard, a braggart, a cheat, and a debauchee, one might
bring, if not an equally formidable, certainly an equally lengthened,
indictment against the whole character of Mrs. Gamp, justifying the
validity of each disreputable charge upon the testimony of her own
evidence.

In its way, the impersonation of Mrs. Gamp by her creator was nearly
as surprising as his original delineation of her in his capacity as
Novelist. Happily, to bring out the finer touches of the humorous in her
portraiture, there were repeated asides in the Reading, added to which
other contrasting characters were here and there momentarily introduced.
Mr. Pecksniff--hardly recognisable, by the way, _as_ Mr. Pecksniff--took
part, but a very subordinate part, in the conversation, as did Mr.
Mould also, and as, towards the close of it, likewise did Mrs. Prig of
Bartlemy's. But, monopolist though Mrs. Gamp showed herself to be in her
manner of holding forth, her talk never degenerated into a monologue.

Mr. Pecksniff