led and forgotten,
were ill fed, scantily clothed, untaught, and beaten. Do-the-boys' Hall
was his type, and many a school prison under that name was fearfully
exposed and scourged. The people read with wonder and applause; these
haunts of cruelty were scrutinized, some of them were suppressed; and
since Nicholas Nickleby appeared no such school can live, because Squeers
and Smike are on every lip, and punishment awaits the tyrant.

Our scope will not permit a review of his numerous novels. In _Oliver
Twist_ he denounces the parish system in its care of orphans, and throws a
Drummond light upon the haunts of crime in London.

_The Old Curiosity Shop_ exposes the mania of gaming, and seems to have
been a device for presenting the pathetic pictures of _Little Nell_ and
her grandfather, the wonderful and rapid learning of the marchioness, and
the uncommon vitality of Mr. Richard Swiveller; and also the compound of
will and hideousness in Quilp.

He affected to find in the receptacle of Master Humphrey's clock, his
_Barnaby Rudge_, a very dramatic picture of the great riot incited by Lord
George Gordon in 1780, which, in its gathering, its fury, and its easy
dispersion, was not unlike that of Wat Tyler. Dickens's delineations are
eminently historic, and present a better notion of the period than the
general history itself.

AMERICAN NOTES.--In 1841 Dickens visited America, where he was received by
the public with great enthusiasm, and annoyed, as the author of his
biography says, by many individuals. On his return to England, he produced
his _American Notes for General Circulation_. They were sarcastic,
superficial, and depreciatory, and astonished many whose hospitalities he
had received. But, in 1843, he published _Martin Chuzzlewit_, in which
American peculiarities are treated with the broadest caricature. The
_Notes_ might have been forgiven; but the novel excited a great and just
anger in America. His statements were not true; his pictures were not
just; his prejudice led him to malign a people who had received him with
a foolish hospitality. He had eaten and drunk at the hands of the men whom
he abused, and his character suffered more than that of his intended
victims. In taking a few foibles for his caricature, he had left our
merits untold, and had been guilty of the implication that we had none,
although he knew that there were as elegant gentlemen, as refined ladies,
and as cultivated society in America as th