humour and their overflow of good-nature stifles criticism.

Dickens's object in writing The Pickwick Papers he assured us in
the preface was "to place before the reader a constant succession
of characters and incidents; to paint them in as vivid colours as
he could command, and to render them, at the same time, life-like
and amusing." All this he succeeded in doing with such amazing
success that we have a masterly picture of English life of the period
to be found in no other book. The secret of the book's popularity
and fame is in its unaffected and flowing style, its dramatic power,
and, of course, its exuberant humour.

But there is much for serious reflection in its pages as well,
and one could dilate at length on the propaganda which is so
thinly camouflaged throughout; propaganda against lawyers, prisons,
corruption in Parliament, celebrity hunting, pomposity, fraud,
hypocrisy and all uncharitableness in the abstract; but all this
is wrapped up in the same way that such things are done in all
the fairy tales of which Pickwick is one of the best.

There are, as a fact, innumerable reasons why Pickwick is so popular,
so necessary to-day. The one which concerns us more at the moment is
its appeal as a mirror of the manners and customs of a romantic age
which has fast receded from us. It is, perhaps, the most accurate
picture extant of the old coaching era and all that was corollary
to it. No writer has done more than Dickens to reflect the glory
of that era, and the glamour and comfort of the old inns of England
which in those days were the havens of the road to every traveller.
All his books abound in pleasant and faithful pictures of the times,
and alluring and enticing descriptions of those old hostelries where