"As he saw all this in one bewildered glance, the death-like stillness came again, and looking back, he saw that the jurymen had turned towards the judge. Hush!

"They only sought permission to retire.

"He looked wistfully into their faces, one by one, when they passed out as though to see which way the greater number lent; but that was fruitless. The jailer touched him on the shoulder. He followed mechanically to the end of the dock, and sat down on a chair. The man pointed it out, or he should not have seen it.

"He looked up into the gallery again. Some of the people were eating, and some fanning themselves with handkerchiefs, for the crowded place was very hot. There was one young man sketching his face in a little note-book. He wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the artist broke his pencil-point and made another with his knife, as any idle spectator might have done.

"In the same way when he turned his eyes towards the judge, his mind began to busy itself with the fashion of his dress, and what it cost, and how he put it on. There was an old fat gentleman on the bench, too, who had gone out some half an hour before, and now came back. He wondered within himself whether this man had been to get his dinner, what he had had, and where he had had it, and pursued this train of careless thought until some new object caught his eye and roused another. "Not that all this time his mind was for an instant free from one oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet; it was ever present to him, but in a vague and general way, and he could not fix his thoughts upon it. Thus, even while he trembled and turned burning hot at the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one had been broken off, and whether they would mend it or leave it as it was. Then he thought of all the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold, and stopped to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it-and then went on to think again.

"At length there was a cry of silence, and a breathless look from all towards the door. The jury returned and passed him close. He could glean nothing from their faces; they might as well have been of stone. Perfect stillness ensued-not a rustle-not a breath.-Guilty.

"The building rang with a tremendous shout, and another, and another, and then it echoed deep loud groans that gathered strength as they swelled out, like angry thunder. It was a peal of joy from the populace outside, greeting the news that he would die on Monday.

"The noise subsided, and he was asked if he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon him. He had resumed his listening attitude, and looked intently at his questioner while the demand was made, but it was twice repeated before he seemed to hear it, and then he only muttered that he was an old man—an old man—an old man -and so dropping into a whisper, was silent again.

"The judge assumed the black cap, and the prisoner still stood with the same air and gesture. A woman in the gallery uttered some exclamation, called forth by this dread solemnity; he looked hastily up as if angry at the interruption, and bent forward yet more attentively. The address was solemn and impressive, the sentence fearful to hear, but he stood like

a marble figure, without the motion of a nerve. His haggard face was still thrust forward, his under-jaw hanging down, and his eyes staring out before him, when the jailer put his hands upon his arm, and beckoned him away. He gazed stupidly about him for an instant, and obeyed."

Follow the felon to that cell from which he is to walk direct to the scaffold. Watchers are his companions :

"Then came night-dark, dismal, silent night. Other watchers are glad to hear the church-clocks strike, for they tell of life and coming day. To the Jew they brought despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden with the one deep hollow sound-Death. What availed the noise and bustle of cheerful morning, which penetrated even there, to him? It was another form of knell, with mockery added to the warning.

"The day passed off-day, there was no day; it was gone as soon as come-and night came on again; night so long and yet so short; long in its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours. One time he raved and blasphemed, and at another howled and tore his hair. Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts, and he beat them off,

"Saturday night; he had only one night more to live. And as he thought of this, the day broke-Sunday.

"It was not until the night of this last awful day that a withering sense of his helpless desperate state came in its full intensity upon his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive hopes of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than the dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of the two men who relieved each other in their attendance upon him, and they, for their parts, made no efforts to arouse his attention. He had sat there awake, but dreaming. Now he started up every minute, and with gasping mouth and burning skin hurried to and fro, in such a paroxysm of fear and wrath that even they-used to such sights-recoiled from him with horror. He grew so terrible at last in all the tortures of his evil conscience, that one man could not bear to sit there, eyeing him alone, and so the two kept watch together.

"He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn and twisted into knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight-nine-ten. If it was not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on each other's heels, where would he be when they came round again! Eleven. Another struck ere the voice of the hour before had ceased to vibrate. At eight he would be the only mourner in his own funeral train; at

eleven

"Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and such unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but too often and too long from the thoughts of men, never held so dread a spectacle as that. The few who lingered as they passed and wondered what the man

was doing who was to be hung to-morrow, would have slept but ill that night, if they could have seen him then."

We have already expressed an opinion in regard to the power and combining talent of Mr. Dickens, and of the easy yet artistic manner in which he can work up his pictures by a diffusive and copious command of a great number of accessaries. He seems to have made himself master of human feelings and actions in so far as they are developed in the lower or middling walks of London life; and what is more, he cherishes a good natured sympathy with all, entering as it were into the condition of his most immoral characters so as in his portraiture to give heartily a perfect image, a rotund flesh and blood embodiment of each,-becoming thus the creator of new personages; but yet in all respects so natural in their lineaments that one feels convinced he has actually met with them in the streets and had more or less intercourse with them. He is a humane satirist; he is free from all bitterness; he never indulges in invective of any kind. His language is natural and happily wedded to his vivifying conceptions; and last but not least, he is quite unaffected and far above attempts at imitation,—that is, he is a true originalist.

But admitting that these features and excellences are characteristic of Boz, and perhaps in no other of his several works do they figure more prominently than in the tale immediately under review, let us ask if he be an originalist that will or should be followed? Has his genius cast itself into a shape that ought to be imitated? is his mode of treating the mediocre, the humble and the wretched subjects which he has chosen, the best that can be adopted, either for the sake of producing humorous or melancholy pictures, or, in regard to higher considerations, for teaching striking moral lessons ?-for there may be abundance of sentimentalism and exceedingly little, or the reverse, of what is pure and worthy in its effects upon virtue and the best principles of conduct.

Now we have come to an opinion not of the most favourable kind in regard to Mr. Dickens's merits as a writer of fiction or as a reprover of vice and an amender of the heart, having our eye particularly directed to his Oliver Twist.

As to construction, the story does not by any means come up to Fielding's or Smollett's fictions. It is, as before hinted, a mere string of sketches that might be carried to any length, or if cut short at any part, a chapter might wind up the indefinite thread. The author's closeness and accuracy of observation are so remarkable that there need be no stop to his truths. But the highest aim of a novelist should be to enchain the reader's mind upon one central group of life and scenery, so as to produce an abiding lesson of a tangible and definite character, and so as to place, as it were, the

spectator upon a summit whence he might survey regions far and wide around to the enlargement and refinement of his sensibilities. A mere succession of sketches no ways necessarily joined, or as is the case in the present instance, often forcibly grouped and without due proportions being observed, however clever or powerful each one figure may be, is mere continuation and a desultory work that must fail of the highest effects which fiction may produce. It is true that writing for a periodical and undertaking to supply each succeeding month an equivalent to the piece that has sparkled immediately before, must help to occasion starts and at intervals slender and loose joinings. But it does not appear from anything that Boz has yet done that he is equal to the demands of a regular novel, or that he is willing to throw himself at once upon a threevolumed production simultaneously published. He finds it wiser, we believe, to keep himself before the public by means of a succession of forcible pictures, attractively framed, than by one great but compact piece the former method having this manifest advantage besides that it allows and tempts newspaper and periodical editors to insert such striking individualized pieces as may suit their humour and the vacancies in their columns, and thus to keep the author always and fully before the public.

As to the moral qualities of Oliver Twist we think that the above extracts, powerful as they are, and evincing searchings of the human soul of extraordinary compass and depth, ought not to rank with many passages and pictures in our language where the heart is laid bare, and the immortal nature of man is made to be seen in its loftiest stirrings, its severest writhings. There is with Boz too much of muscular agony; so that his most laboured pictures have fully more of the horrible in them than of the awful and grand.

Again in the present tale, or string of stories, it looks as if he revelled, while painting low or degraded nature, among objects which, unless merely subservient to finer and higher elements equally well drawn and finished, never can awaken our nobler sympathies, nor prune and invigorate the wings of these awakened sensibilities. On this account, we cannot place our author among those novelists who are models in regard to the inculcation of moral sentiments and the lessons that refine while they delight.

Not that Mr. Dickens is an immoral writer. It is not in his nature to be such; it is the furthest possible thing from his intention, evidently, to write for the mere sake of gain, of entertainment, or of merely harmless fiction. He has high and pure aims; nor can he have failed of doing good, morally speaking. See how he identifies himself uniformly with the oppressed; how with his sly yet effective humour he has exposed systematic and institutional abuses; and what is more, how forcibly he shows that the vilest in the population is far more an object of commiseration than of anger.

Still we must recur to the opinion already given, that neither his subjects nor his manner of treating them, especially in Oliver Twist, can ever entitle him to the highest rank of our moral fictionists. He is a Crabbe rather than a Richardson, or a Goldsmith; but then he is twenty times superior to Sterne, or rather has not one particle of that sentimentality which intoxicates and vitiates while it seems merely to etherealize.

Yet were it not the purity of his nature and the excellence of his purpose, joined to admirable tact and delicate taste, it would be impossible for Boz to preserve the moral influence which he undoubtedly possesses, or to avoid offending against feelings which none can safely touch. On this account, tenderly and warily though he has borne himself, it would be dangerous for a less skilful and considerate performer to adventure after him; and therefore we advise every one to eschew him as a model. Who but he, that would attempt such an experiment, could have represented the character of Nancy in full, who had descended far from the ways of virtue and leagued herself with desperadoes and robbers, and yet not only have preserved her a true woman in various respects, but never to have trenched upon delicacy or written a word that can send a blush to the face of innocence? In this single instance alone there is a fine mastery; and for this as well as many other excellences we admire Mr. Dickens; but who shall follow him and be so faultless? These few and hurriedly uttered sentiments indicate what we think of the author's works in general, and of Oliver Twist especially. We have spoken honestly; and have now only to add that whoever supposes that the history of the "Parish Boy's Progress," -after reading it at one or two sittings, or without any considerable intervals, from beginning to end,-will be as popular twenty years hence as it has been and is now, have tastes and expectations very different from those entertained by us. The production may continue to find favour among pure Londoners; but elsewhere we have no idea of its maintaining its past popularity, nor that it or its brethren will ever add much future reputation to England and its array of fictionists.

ART. IV.-Moral Views of Commerce, Society, and Politics, in Twelve Discourses. By the REV. ORVILLE DEWEY. London: Charles Fox.

1838.

THE results of Mr. Dewey's visit to Europe and this country in a written form were before us some two or three years ago; and the favour with which the work has been received in America as well as in England has been such as we anticipated. In the present volume he comes before us in a different shape, viz. that of sermons, or discourses from the pulpit on the morals of trade, and the rules