The faculties of the man were allied to the energy and passion of the youth, and the former ruled the latter with a severe and salutary grasp. The secret motives of man had been learnt in the interim; human springs of action had been detected in their distant hiding places; the inner soul of the world had been more deeply penetrated, and more closely scanned by the writer’s understanding. The pictures were no longer sketches—the masterstrokes were something more than indications. The vulgarity of Titmouse was shown with the self-denying patience and enlightened industry of a surgeon laying bare the loathsomeness of a repelling sore. What inclination would have shut away for ever, conscientious duty required to be exposed. Vulgarity is exposed in the history of Tittlebat Titmouse, and is utterly crushed. In nothing, however, is the contrast between Mr Warren in 1830, and the same gentleman in 1839, so remarkable as in the conception of Mr Gammon. The character is a perfect emanation of instructed genius; the admixture of good and evil—good in evil, and evil in good—could have been portrayed only by one knowing thoroughly “all qualities with a learned spirit of human dealings.” None but a creator, conscious of his strength, and fortified by the convictions which knowledge and experience give, would have conceived—or if conceived, dared—to exhibit the incomparable portraiture of which we speak. He, Gammon, stands immortalised in Mr Warren’s pages, neither a monster of good nor a monster of evil, but partaking of both qualities; largely of one, and in a smaller degree of the other, as is nature’s wont. Noble amongst the very base, and base amongst the very noble, he is an object of sorrow more than of execration,—of sympathy, not of hate, in his evil associations; of deep pity, not of vengeance, when he mixes for a season with the pure. Wanting religion and the practice of piety, which alone yields the highest moral rectitude, Gammon fails to earn approval even when he most deserves it, and in his brightest moments leaves no better impression on the mind than that of a wretched bundle of foul weeds, steeped for the time in heroism. The seeming incongruities of the character testify at once to its fidelity: the reality of the picture is heightened by the colours which the master, with infinite skill, has selected from his palette.