kind of school, and to illustrate that kind of school he has recourse to
his newly-discovered treasure. "Much as I have published, I do not think
it has ever yet happened to me to comment in print upon any production
of Charles Dickens. What a pleasure to have the opportunity of praising
a work so sound, a work so rich in merit, as _David Copperfield_!... Of
the contemporary rubbish which is shot so plentifully all round us, we
can, indeed, hardly read too little. But to contemporary work so good as
_David Copperfield_ we are in danger of perhaps not paying respect
enough, of reading it (for who could help reading it?) too hastily, and
then putting it aside for something else and forgetting it. What
treasures of gaiety, invention, life, are in that book! what alertness
and resource! what a soul of good nature and kindness governing the
whole! Such is the admirable work which I am now going to call in
evidence. Intimately, indeed, did Dickens know the Middle Class; he was
bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. Intimately he knew its
bringing-up. With the hand of a master he has drawn for us a type of the
teachers and trainers of its youth, a type of its places of education.
Mr. Creakle and Salem House are immortal. The type itself, it is to be
hoped, will perish; but the drawing of it which Dickens has given cannot
die. Mr. Creakle, the stout gentleman with a bunch of watch-chain and
seals, in an armchair, with the fiery face and the thick veins in his
forehead; Mr. Creakle sitting at his breakfast with the cane, and a
newspaper, and the buttered toast before him, will sit on, like Theseus,
for ever. For ever will last the recollection of Salem House, and of the
'daily strife and struggle' there; the recollection 'of the frosty
mornings when we were rung out of bed, and the cold, cold smell of the
dark nights when we were rung into bed again; of the evening schoolroom
dimly lighted and indifferently warmed, and the morning schoolroom which
was nothing but a great shivering-machine; of the alternation of boiled
beef with roast beef, and boiled mutton with roast mutton; of clods of