Page:Fitzgerald - Pickwickian manners and customs (1897).djvu/42



The fruitfulness of Pickwick, and amazing prolificness, that is one of its marvels. It is regularly "worked on," like Dante or Shakespeare. The Pickwickian Library is really a wonder. It is intelligible how a work like Boswell's "Johnson," full of allusions and names of persons who have lived, spoken, and written, should give rise to explanation and commentaries; but a work of mere imagination, it would be thought, could not furnish such openings. As we have just seen, Pickwick and the other characters are so real, so artfully blended with existing usages, manners, and localities, as to become actual living things.

Mere panegyric of one's favourite is idle. So I lately took a really effective way of proving the surprising fertility of the work and of its power of engendering speculation and illustra-