of morality. Ah, can we
measure by years the time between that day and this? Is the fastidious,
the impartial, the non-moral novelist only the grandchild, and not the
remote posterity, of Dickens, who would not leave Scrooge to his egoism,
or Gradgrind to his facts, or Mercy Pecksniff to her absurdity, or Dombey
to his pride? Nay, who makes Micawber finally to prosper? Truly, the
most unpardonable thing Dickens did in those deplorable last chapters of
his was the prosperity of Mr. Micawber. "Of a son, in difficulties"--the
perfect Micawber nature is respected as to his origin, and then perverted
as to his end. It is a pity that Mr. Peggotty ever came back to England
with such tidings. And our last glimpse of the emigrants had been made
joyous by the sight of the young Micawbers on the eve of emigration;
"every child had its own wooden spoon attached to its body by a strong
line," in preparation for Colonial life. And then Dickens must needs go
behind the gay scenes, and tell us that the long and untiring delight of
the book was over. Mr. Micawber, in the Colonies, was never again to
make punch with lemons, in a crisis of his fortunes, and "resume his
peeling with a desperate air"; nor to observe the expression of his
friends' faces during Mrs. Micawber's masterly exposition of the
financial situation or of the possibilities of the coal trade; nor to eat
walnuts out of a paper bag what time the die was cast and all was over.
Alas! nothing was over until Mr. Micawber's pecuniary liabilities were
over, and the perfect comedy turned into dulness, the joyous
impossibility of a figure of immortal fun into cold improbability.

There are several such late or last chapters that one would gladly cut
away: that of Mercy Pecksniff's pathos, for example; that of Mr. Dombey's
installation in his daughter's home; that which undeceives us as to Mr.
Boffin's antic disposition. But how true and how whole a heart it was
that urged these unlucky conclusions! How shall we venture to complain?
The hand that made its Pecksniff in pure wit, has it not the right to
belabour him in earnest--albeit a kind of earnest that disappoints us?
And Mr. Dombey is Dickens's own Dombey, and he must do what he will with
that finely wrought figure of pride. But there is a little irony in the
fact that Dickens leaves more than one villain to his orderly fate for
whom we care little either way; it is nothing to us, whom Carker never
convinced, that t