Nicholas.—“I did! This must not go on!”
Squeers, again, with a frightful look.—“Must not go on?”
Nicholas.—“Must not! Shall not! I will prevent it!”
Then came Nicholas Nickleby's manly denunciation of the scoundrel, interrupted one while for an instant by Squeers screaming out, “Sit down, you—beggar!” and followed at its close by the last and crowning outrage, consequent on a violent outbreak of wrath on the part of Squeers, who spat at him and struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture: when Nicholas, springing upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat—don't we all exult in the remembrance of it?—“beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.”
After that climax has been attained, two other particulars are alone worthy of being recalled to recollection in regard to this Reading. First, the indescribable heartiness of John Browdie's cordial shake-of-the-hand with Nicholas Nickleby on their encountering each other by accident upon the high road. “Shake honds? Ah! that I weel!” coupled with his ecstatic shout (so ecstatic that his horse shyed at it), “Beatten schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho! Beatten schoolmeasther! Who ever heard o' the loike o' that, noo? Give us thee hond agean, yoongster! Beatten schoolmeasther! Dang it, I loove thee for 't!” Finally, and as the perfecting touch of tenderness between the two cousins, then unknown to each other as such, in the early morning light at Boroughbridge, we caught a glimpse of Nicholas and Smike passing, hand in hand, out of the old barn together.
MR. BOB SAWYER'S PARTY.
Quite as exhilarating in its way as the all-but dramatised report of the great breach of promise case tried before Mr. Justice Stareleigh, was that other condensation of a chapter from “Pickwick,” descriptive of Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party. It was a Reading, in the delivery of which the Reader himself had evidently the keenest sense of enjoyment. As a humorous description, it was effervescent with fun, being written throughout in the happiest, earliest style of the youthful genius of Boz, when the green numbers were first shaking the sides of lettered and unlettered Englishmen alike with Homeric laughter. Besides this, when given by him as a Reading, it comprised within it one of his very drollest impersonations. If only as the means of introducing us to Jack Hopkins, it would have been most acceptable. But, inimitable though Jack was, he was, at the least, thoroughly well companioned.
As a relish of what was coming, there was that preliminary account of the locality in which the festivities were held, to wit, Lant Street, in the borough of Southwark, the prevailing repose of which, we were told, “sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul”—fully justifying its selection as a haven of rest by any one who wished “to abstract himself from the world, to remove himself from the reach of temptation, to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of window!” As specimens of animated nature, familiarly met with in the neighbourhood, “the pot-boy, the muffin youth, and the baked potato man,” had about them a perennial freshness. Whenever we were reminded, again, in regard to the principal characteristics of the population that it was migratory, “usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by night,” her Majesty's revenues being seldom collected in that happy valley, its rents being pronounced dubious, and its water communication described as “frequently cut off,” we found in respect to the whole picture thus lightly-sketched in, that age did not wither nor custom stale its infinite comicality.
It was when the familiar personages of the story were, one after another, introduced upon the scene, however, that the broad Pickwickian humour of it all began in earnest to be realised. After we had listened with chuckling enjoyment to the ludicrously minute account given of the elaborate preparations made for the reception of the visitors, even in the approaches to Mr. Bob Sawyer's apartment, down to the mention of the kitchen candle with a long snuff, that “burnt cheerfully on the ledge of the staircase window,” we had graphically rendered the memorable scene between poor, dejected Bob and his little spitfire of a landlady, Mrs. Raddle. So dejected and generally suppressed was Bob in the Reading, however, that we should hardly have recognised that very archetype of the whole genus of rollicking Medical Students, as originally described in the pages of Pickwick, where he is depicted as attired in “a coarse blue coat, which, without being either a great-coat or a surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both,” having about him that sort of slovenly smartness and swaggering gait peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, and shout and scream in the same by night, calling waiters by their Christian names, and altogether bearing a resemblance upon the whole to something like a dissipated Robinson Crusoe. Habited, Bob still doubtless was, in the plaid trousers and the large, rough coat and double-breasted waistcoat, but as for the “swaggering gait” just mentioned not a vestige of it remained. Nor could that be wondered at, indeed, for an instant, beholding and hearing, as we did, the shrill ferocity with which Mrs. Raddle had it out with him about the rent immediately before the arrival of his guests.