eap Jack is represented as going through his customary
patter on the foot-board with his poor little Sophy--the first of the
three Sophies, his own by birth, and not simply by adoption--the while
she is slowly dying on his shoulder. Thackeray was right when he said of
the humour of Dickens, "It is a mixture of love and wit." Laughter and
tears, with him, lay very near--speaking of him as an author, we may say
by preference--lie very near indeed together. It is in those passages
in which they come in astonishingly rapid alternation, and at moments
almost simultaneously, that he is invariably at his very best. The
incident here alluded to is one of these more exquisite descriptions,
and it was one, that, by voice and look and manner, he himself most
exquisitely delineated. When the poor Cheap Jack, with Sophy holding
round his neck, steps out from the shelter of the cart upon the
foot-board, and the waiting crowd all set up a laugh on seeing
them--"one chuckle-headed Joskin (that I hated for it) making a bid
'tuppence for her!'"--Doctor Marigold begins his tragi-comic allocution.
It is sown thickly all through with the most whimsical of his conceits,
but it is interrupted also here and there with infinitely pathetic
touches of tenderness.

Fragmentary illustrations of either would but dimly shadow forth,
instead of clearly elucidating, what is here meant in the recollection
of those who can still recall this Reading of "Doctor Marigold" to
their remembrance. Those who never heard it as it actually fell from the
Author's lips, by turning to the original sketch, and running through
that particular portion of it to themselves, may more readily conjecture
than by the aid of mere piecemeal quotation, all that the writer of
those riant and tearful pages would be capable of accomplishing by its
utterance, bringing to its delivery, as he could, so many of the rarer
gifts of genius, and so many also of the rarest accomplishments of art.

SIKES AND NANCY.

On Saturday, the 14th of November, 1868, there were assembled together
in front of the great platform in St. James's Hall, Piccadilly, as fit
audience, but few, somewhere about fifty of the critics, artists, and
literary men of London. A card of invitation, stamped with a facsimile
of the well-known autograph of Charles Dickens, and countersigned by
the Messrs. Chappell and Company, had, with a witty significance, bidden
them to that rendezvous for a "Private Trial of the