The biographer of Mr. Dickens is naturally reluctant to admit the social insignificance in London, forty years ago, of a "struggling author," and he is grossly abusive of Mr. N. P. Willis for describing his hero as he appeared at this stage of his career. Mr. Willis visited him at a dismal building in Holborn, in company with one of Mr. Dickens's publishers, and he gave a brief account of what he saw, which doubtless was the exact truth. Willis was a faithful chronicler of the minutiæ of a scene. He was a stickler for having the small facts correct. "We pulled up," he wrote, "at the entrance of a large building used for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs, and a few books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens, for the contents. I was only struck at first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers)--the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit." He describes Dickens as dressed rather in the Swiveller style, though without Richard's swell look: hair close cropped, clothes jaunty and scant, "the very personification of a close sailer to the wind." There is nothing in this discreditable to the "poor author," and nothing which a person who knew London then would deem improbable. Is it not a principle imbedded in the constitution of Britons that the person who receives money in small amounts for work and labor done is the party obliged, and must stand hat in hand before him who pays it? Whoever shall truly relate the history of the people of Great Britain in the nineteenth century will not pass by in silence the publication of "Pickwick." Cruikshank, Seymour, and Irving, as well as the humorists of other times, had nourished and molded the genius of Dickens; but, like all the masters in art, he so far transcended his immediate teachers that, even in what he most obviously derived from them, he was original. And it is he, not they, who is justly hailed as the founder of that benign school of comic art which gives us humor without coarseness, and satire without ill nature. It is "Pickwick" that marks the era, and the sole interest which Seymour's sketches now possess is in showing us from what Charles Dickens departed when he founded the Pickwick Club. CHAPTER XXIV. COMIC ART IN "PUNCH." [Illustration: The Boy who chalked up "No Popery!" and then ran away!--Lord John Russell and the Bill for Preventing the Assumption of Ecclesiastical Titles by Roman Catholics. (John Leech, in _Punch_.)