After this sketch had been written, a somewhat startling suggestion, that the idea of The Clockmaker had been borrowed from Dickens, and that Sam Slick was merely a Yankee version of Sam Weller, led to an inquiry into the point. The coincidences were many, and could hardly be accidental. Dickens sends off Pickwick in his wanderings without any apparent object in view, accompanied by a shrewd and humorous Cockney valet, whose sayings and doings are the prominent feature of the book; while Judge Haliburton sends off the author on very similar travels, accompanied by a cute Yankee, for whose yarns and jokes the book is simply a peg on which they can be hung. In both cases there is the faintest apology for a connected story. If any one had been guilty of plagiarism, it was Dickens, for the first number of the “Pickwick Papers” appeared in April, 1836, while the early chapters of “The Clockmaker” were published in 1835, and were at once widely copied by the American press, and may have been seen by Dickens. The Cockney dialect was used as far back as 1811 in a farce by Samuel Beazley, architect; and no doubt the Yankee dialect in “The Clockmaker” was not its first appearance in literature. Duncan Campbell says in his “History of Nova Scotia” (p. 335), “Sam Slick, the Clockmaker, immediately attracted attention. The character proved to be as original and amusing as Sam Weller. Samuel amuses us only. Slick both amuses and instructs. Rarely do we find in any character, not excepting the best of Scott’s, the same degree of originality and force, combined with humor, sagacity, and sound sense, as we find in the Clockmaker. Industry and perseverance are effectively inculcated in comic story and racy narrative. In the department of instructive humor Haliburton stands, perhaps, unrivalled in English literature.” The _Spectator_ (London) calls him “One of the shrewdest of humorists;” and his biographer in Chambers’ Encyclopedia says, “he attained a place and fame difficult to acquire at all times—that of a man whose humor was a native of one country and became naturalized in another, for humor is the least exotic of the gifts of Genius.” Philarète Chasles in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_,[7] in a long and favorable notice of Judge Haliburton’s works, pronounced them to be unequalled by anything that had been written in England since the days of Sir Walter Scott.