ed--if his development received no untimely check--to be
completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.

Or rather than the incident of the butcher and the beef-steak. He gently
presses it, in a cabbage leaf, into Tom Pinch's pocket. "'For meat,' he
said with some emotion, 'must be humoured, not drove.'"

A generation, between his own and the present, thought Dickens to be
vulgar; if the cause of that judgement was that he wrote about people in
shops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of the
novelist's research. "High life" and most wretched life have now given
place to the little shop and its parlour, during a year or two. But Dr.
Brown, the author of _Rab and His Friends_, thought that Dickens
committed vulgarities in his diction. "A good man was Robin" is right
enough; but "He was a good man, was Robin" is not so well, and we must
own that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases as
it were dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words that
Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles Lamb misuses one of them
precisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. But
for these his English is admirable; he chooses what is good and knows
what is not. A little representative collection of the bad or foolish
English of his day might be made by gathering up what Dickens forbore and
what he derided; for instance, Mr. Micawber's portly phrase, "gratifying
emotions of no common description," and Littimer's report that "the young
woman was partial to the sea." This was the polite language of that
time, as we conclude when we find it to be the language that Charlotte
Bronte shook off; but before she shook it off she used it. Dickens, too,
had something to throw off; in his earlier books there is an
inflation--rounded words fill the inappropriate mouth of Bill Sikes
himself--but he discarded them with a splendid laugh. They are charged
upon Mr. Micawber in his own character as author. See him as he sits by
to hear Captain Hopkins read the petition in the debtors' prison "from
His Most Gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects." Mr. Micawber
listened, we read, "with a little of an author's vanity, contemplating
(not severely) the spikes upon the opposite wall." It should be
remembered that when Dickens shook himself free of everything that
hampered his genius he was not so much beloved or so much applauded as
when he gave to his cordia