Page:Fitzgerald - Pickwickian manners and customs (1897).djvu/82

 students and many odd beings. We can trace his extraordinary appreciation of Christmas—and its genial, softening festivities—which clung to him till it altogether faded out, to the same sense of relief; it furnished an opportunity of forgetting for a time (at least), the dismal, gloomy home.

Boz, if he drew his characters from life, did not draw wholesale; he would take only a portion of a character that pleased him and work it up in combination with another distinct character. It was thus he dealt with Leigh Hunt, borrowing his amusing, airy frivolity, and combining it with the meanness and heartlessness of Skimpole. I have always fancied that Dowler in "Pickwick" was founded—after this composite principle—on his true-hearted but imperious friend, Forster. Forster was indeed also a perfect reproduction of Dr. Johnson and had the despotic intolerance—in conversation certainly—of that great man. Like him "if his pistol missed fire, he knocked you down with the