GLEANINGS FROM DICKENS.*

Muca as the sentiment expressed in the tritest of Tenny sonian quotations may recommend itself at first sight to

readers, the touch of the vanished hand and the sound of the voice that is still do not always produce exactly the results that are expected of them. We cannot see that there is anything gained by disinterring, as in the present instance,.

a disconnected handful of fugitive articles by a man like Dickens, whose authorship might have just as well been left

to the imagination. The collector seems to have ransacked' the byways and hedges for these pointless rechauffes, which.

are of so purely temporary a nature as to possess in them-. selves no interest whatever at the present day, and to acquire none from the great name so enforcedly attached to them, but what the mere name itself can give. One of these papers,. called "The Thousand are Humbugs," we perfectly well remember to have read at the time of its appearance many years ago in Household Words or in All the Year Round (from

which magazines most of these little papers appear to have been

culled) with but small weed of appreciation. We never dreamed then of attributing it to the master, and are sorry

to find that to him it ought to have been attributed. Dickens was never really at his best when he indulged his favourite vein of satire on existing institutions ; and the paper in ques- tion is really very clumsy jesting on the Minister and House of Commons of the day, in an Oriental form. The Sultan

Taxedtaurus (or Fleeced Bull) had been married to many wives, who bore the style of Howsa Kummauns (pronounced House o' Commons), and signifying Peerless Chatterer :- " At length the young and lovely Reefawm (that is to say,. Light of Reason), the youngest and fairest of all the Sultan's. wives, and to whom he had looked with hope to recompense him for his many disappointments, made as bad a Howes Kummaum as any of the rest. The unfortunate Taxedtanrus took this so' much to heart that he fell into a profound melancholy, secluded himself from observation, and was so seldom seen or heard of thaib, many of his great officers supposed him to be dead. Shall I never, said the unhappy Monarch, beating his breast in his retirement in the Pavilion of Failure, and giving vent to his tears, find v. Howsa Kummauns who will be true to me ! He then quoted from the Poet certain verses importing, Every Howse, Kummauns has deceived me, every Howsa Kummauns is a Humbug. I must slay the present Howsa Kummanns as I have slain so many others.

• To be Read at Dusk, andths Stories, Sketches, and Buoys. By Charles Dickens. Now First Collected: Lidos : deorge Redway.

I am brought to shame and mortification. I am despised by the world. After which his grief so overpowered him, that he fainted away. It happened that on recovering his senses he heard the voice of the last-made Howsa Kummauns in the Divan adjoining. Applying his ear to the lattice, and finding that that shameless Princess was vaunting her loyalty and virtue, and denying a host of facts—which she always did, all night—the Sultan drew his scimitar in a fury, resolved to put an end to her existence. But the Grand Vizier Parmarstoon (or Twirling Weathercock), who was at that moment watching his incensed master from behind the silken curtains of the Pavilion of Failure, hurried forward and prostrated himself, trembling, on the ground. This Vizier had newly succeeded to Abuddeen (or the Addled), who had for his misdeeds been strangled with a garter."

The humour which turns Aberdeen into Abuddeen and Palmerston into Parmarstoon, and represents Reform under the guise of Reefawm, is scarcely of the kind to be described as spontaneous ; and its absolute want of appropriateness at the present day must strike all the readers who find Rosebery and Balfour and Home-rule familiar words upon the tongue.

The moral of such a reproduction, however, goes further than this. We have constantly maintained the value of the anonymous in periodical literature, and in cases where a writer prefers to remain anonymous, not that he may indulge in irresponsible personalities, but simply because he is writing what he wants to put forward as the expression, not so much of an individual opinion as of a tone of thought, it is not fair to him to take the anonymity away. Dickens, moreover, had so large an amount of editorial labour upon his hands, and had to do so much fugitive

work in order to fill a page at a moment's notice, or to supply the deficiencies of a failing contributor, that to him

above all men, in view of his unassailable greatness, the pro- tection which he wished to secure should have been due. The papers about " Capital Punishment" and about "Railway Companies," and the elaborate attacks upon Lord Shaftes- bury and Cruikshank for what Dickens considered as dangerous and overstrained philanthropy, or as unpardonable prejudice, were so obviously intended for the mere purpose of the moment as to be out of court altogether in a trial upon Dickens's work. The remarks upon Leech and the (then) rising generation—long since, alas ! arisen and greatly passed away—are in themselves readable as a reminiscence to those who remember Leech's delightful girls, so pretty and English and so far from " date," and the peculiar type of swell, always with us in one form or another, but passed away in that which reached its apotheosis in Sothern's

wonderful Dundreary. But to how many existent beings can it be a matter of interest tc read, under the style and title of an essay by Charles Dickens, that "Much Ado about Nothing and Comas were repeated on Tuesday to a crowded

house!' They were received with no less enthusiasm than on the occasion of Mr. Macready's benefit, and are announced for repetition twice a week Mrs. Nisbett is no less charming than at first, and Miss Fortescue is more so, from having a greater share of confidence in her bearing, and a somewhat smaller nosegay in her breast. Both Mr. Phelps and Mr. W. Bennett deserve especial notice, as acting at once with great spirit and great discretion." To think that this same Mr. Phelps (Leonato or Antorio, probably) had a whole

life and a whole career to follow out since then, and to termi- nate long ago. The stereotyped phrases of the regular theatrical critic, whose place Dickens probably had to take for the moment, scarcely deserve so odd a bid for immor-

tality, and the few remarks upon Macready's Benedick will scarcely compensate for the enormity. The article upon the acting of Mr. Fechter, a more carious phenomenon than Macready's, and more fairly within living memory,

is a more interesting study in view of the perennial interest of Hamlet to the world ; but it is amusing to

find that at the time it was regarded merely as a good- natured, but not very well-advised " puff " for a friend about to seek a new fame and fortune in the United States. After this, a newspaper summary of the "Report of the Commis- sioners appointed to inquire [Dickens, we arc sure, spelt it with an e'] into the conditions of the persons variously engaged in the University of Oxford " may be studied as another contribution to pre-A.damic history, while the paper

upon the " Guild of Literature and Art," a forerunner of the Society of Authors in which Dickens and Bulwer Lytton chiefly interested themselves, will recall the mots of the day which called the latter's comedy, Not so Boil as We Scent, written for the occasion, by the name of Much Worse than We Expected, and that of the bewildered noble who met the strange Guild at their reception (there was a Bohemia then), and said that if he had not heard that they were clever people he should have thought it was a meeting of the Free Foresters. What would the society-petted authors and actors of the present day have to say to that P

In short, we are sorry about this book. The first stories, which give its name, are just good for half-an-hour's reading, and that is all ; while the absence of the familiar name of Chapman and Hall from the compilation lend it an unlicensed strangeness which neither the disjointed contents nor the old signature on the cover will do much to make up for. There never was a volume with less of the better Dickens about it.