(With a fine Engraving on Steel.)

BATING our characteristic extravagance, in perhaps overdoing the matter, the enthusiasm attending Mr. Dickens's welcome to our shores has afforded a spectacle which may justly be regarded, not alone with satisfaction, but even with pride. We see in it an evidence of the quick and warm sympathy with which the popular heart rarely fails to respond to the hand that touches its finer chords, by appealing to its sense of the beautiful, the noble, and the good, its kindly charities and universal human affections. So that it strikes us with an impression of pleasure, akin to that always awakened when, in a crowded theatre, the utterance of any high or beautiful sentiment will elicit, as it usually does, independently of any merit of performance by the actor, a generous burst of feeling from that promiscuous audience, which does as much honor to the hearts it comes from, as to the author to whose work such applause is the noblest of tributes.

We see, moreover, in this a striking symptom of a more just and pure appreciation commencing to prevail, in the general public mind, of the only true greatness by which one man can be distinguished above the common level of his fellows-the greatness of goodness, and of genius faithfully applied to its high mission of the improvement and elevation of mankind. Who, tell us, is this young stranger, about whose path we crowd with so warm and eager a homage of our hearts-toward whom our souls thus yearn so kindly, as to some dear friend or brother whom we have long loved, though never seen-whom we are so anxious to clasp hand to hand, and to meet in that silent sympathy which passes between men like the transit of the electric spark when their eyes meet-who is he? Is it a soldier, coming crowned with all the crimsoned laurels of war-who has proved himself in bat

tle, fearless of his own life, and careless of that of others, and has heroically murdered his thousands and tens of thousands in some great day of blood, and made desolate the hearth-stones of as many happy homes? No, no-there is no taint of "the military" about him. He never wore a sword by his side, nor a regimental title to his name; and we have no doubt that he holds all the shining nonsense of epaulettes and cocked hats, which delight so many 'children of a larger growth,' in about the same respect that he does the penny trumpets of his nursery reminiscences. No, no, thank God!—the soldier has not yet cursed the earth by his presence, who, in that capacity, would have elicited from the great heart of our people the welcome which has greeted the arrival of this young man to our shores.

Nor is he either aristocrat or millionaire. As to his purse, he has to fill it from time to time by a draft on his wits, like the poorest scribbler of the tribe; and as to rank, we are rejoiced that there is no other nobility about him than the universal title of simple and glorious manhood. He is neither Prince nor Lord —but there is neither Prince nor Lord in Christendom to whom we should have awarded the ovation of such a reception. Whether he ever had a grandfather or not, we are not informed-though, from the silence of the voice of fame, which has busied itself so much of late with him and his, this point may be considered doubtful. At any rate, his very name suffices to acquit him of any taint of 'gentle blood,' and he first appears on the surface of the world in the humblest capacity of plebeian penny-a-lining. But in our day and generation the Pen is a far more powerful weapon, to open the world's oyster, than ever was the Sword; and in the position to which it has already elevated this poor and obscure youth, we delight to read an expression of the homage of the age to its divine right and its magic might.

The chief secret of his extraordinary success is to be found in the accordance of the spirit generally pervading his writings with the democratic genius now everywhere rapidly developing itself as the principle of that new civilization, whose dawn is just brightening upon the world. We see that his mind is strongly possessed with a true sense of the unjust suffering, moral and physical, by which the mass of mankind are everywhere pressed down to the dust, and especially in the country to which hitherto the scope of his observation has been confined, with a kindly and brotherly sorrow for the hapless fate of its victims, and a righteous and manly indignation against its causes. This is that deep chord in the mighty lyre of the great popular heart, from which his touch has drawn forth a note at the same time so

powerful, and attuned to so fine and sweet a harmony with the spontaneous sympathies of millions. We warn Wellington and Peel, we warn Toryism in general, against this young writer. If they had at their disposal the Bastilles and lettres-de-cachet of another day, we would advise their prompt application, as soon as he shall set foot in England again, on his return from his present visit, where his popular tendencies are not likely to be weakened. There is nothing in any of the books he has yet produced, of a manifest political character, or of any probable political design. Yet there is that in them all which is calculated to hasten on the great crisis of the English Revolution (speed the hour!) far more effectively than any of the open assaults of Radicalism or Chartism. The great idea they all assert is that idea of human equality, under the influence of the progress of which the regal palaces and baronial castles of the whole world are crumbling and destined to crumble to ruin. He gives a strong shake to all the comfortable illusions with which upper life in England has been so long wont to surround itself, to lay to its soul the flattering unction that all these conventional artificialities of its little world within a world are true realities, and necessary to human existence and society. The English aristocrat looks down, from the eminence of his accidental position, upon the toiling, and suffering, and half-starving millions there far down beneath him, somewhat as from the summit of Dover Cliff:

"Half way down

Hangs one that gathers samphire — dreadful trade!

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head;

The fishermen that walk upon the beach

Appear like mice.”

He is too distant and too high above them to realize* that they are indeed his fellows and his brethren, of the same flesh and

* A very good and useful word, however it may be sneered at by English critics as an Americanism. Why should we be afraid of introducing new words into the language which it is our mission to spread over a new world? we who have introduced into it, for exportation as well as home consumption, so many new ideas and new things. A fig for this affected antiquarian precision of language! It is well rebuked by a great authority in the following extract from those charming volumes, Miss Sedgwick's Letters from Europe:

"I was struck with the different views that are taken of the same subject in different positions, when afterward, in a conversation with the celebrated Manzoni, he asked me if America, in emancipating herself from political dependance, had also obtained intellectual freedom; if, unenslaved by the classic models of England, we ventured to modify the language, and to use such new phrases and words as naturally sprung from new circumstances."

blood, the same form, features, and feelings with himself. The contemplation of them produces not much more real and lasting effect on his mind than if they were indeed so many "mice." Such a writer as Dickens takes him quietly by the hand, and leads him down into the midst of them. He jostles among their infinite throng; he hears now with a thrilling distinctness those voices of their suffering and their despair which the wind could not before waft up to his ears; he looks into their pale and thin faces, and can see their tears, their furrows, and the melancholy stamp of expression left there by the daily hardship of the lot which has passed upon them from their cradle. He learns, too, the truth he never before suspected, how accidental a thing is nine-tenths of the vice and crime which he has always regarded as the natural element of existence to the degraded "lower orders," from whose ranks his soldiers and his sheriffs are daily wont to fill his jails, to people his penal colonies, or to select the subjects with which to grace his gallows. He begins to understand how all this grows out of causes for which he is more responsible than they. And seeing that after all, on the whole, human nature down there is as good and as divine a thing as it is up above; that it is made up of the same materials, the same wants, affections, passions, capabilities; that the loveliness of virtue is not made up of the purple and fine linen with which he has been accustomed to behold her draped, whenever she visits those "circles" to which his daily round of life has been confined, he begins to understand that there is indeed a holy and a mighty truth in that fine, sturdy, plebeian line which he has so often heard quoted, but never before felt;

“The rank is but the guinea's stamp,

The man's the gowd, for a' that!"

England's "upper classes" have too long scorned to believe. that men were men; her "lower" have too long scarce dared to admit the bold thought into their minds; both are now beginning to see and to feel it; and we trust that the day is not far distant when the latter will prove to all the world, that they not only know their right to the name, equally with duke or king, but that they are not unworthy of it.

We shall not here embark upon any general criticism or analysis of Mr. Dickens's writings, though we regard them and their reception by the people of both sides of the ocean as so important a phenomenon in the times, that we shall before long attempt the task. But there is one striking defect in them which, in the