"David Copperfield" was published between May, 1849, and the autumn of 1850, and marks, I think, the culminating point in Dickens' career as a writer. So far there had been, not perhaps from book to book, but on the whole, decided progress, the gradual attainment of greater ease, and of the power of obtaining results of equal power by simpler means. Beyond this there was, if not absolute declension, for he never wrote anything that could properly be called careless and unworthy of himself, yet at least no advance. Of the interest that attaches to the book from the fact that so many portions are autobiographical, I have already spoken; nor need I go over the ground again. But quite apart from such adventitious attractions, the novel is an admirable one. All the scenes of little David's childhood in the Norfolk home--the Blunderstone rookery, where there were no rooks--are among the most beautiful pictures of childhood in existence. In what sunshine of love does the lad bask with his mother and Peggotty, till Mrs. Copperfield contracts her disastrous second marriage with Mr. Murdstone! Then how the scene changes. There come harshness and cruelty; banishment to Mr. Creakle's villainous school; the poor mother's death; the worse banishment to London, and descent into warehouse drudgery; the strange shabby-genteel, happy-go-lucky life with the Micawbers; the flight from intolerable ills in the forlorn hope that David's aunt will take pity on him. Here the scene changes again. Miss Betsy Trotwood, a fine old gnarled piece of womanhood, places the boy at school at Canterbury, where he makes acquaintance with Agnes, the woman whom he marries far, far on in the story; and with her father, Mr. Wickham, a somewhat port wine-loving lawyer; and with Uriah Heep, the fawning villain of the piece. How David is first articled to a proctor in Doctors' Commons, and then becomes a reporter, and then a successful author; and how he marries his first wife, the childish Dora, who dies; and how, meanwhile, Uriah is effecting the general ruin, and aspiring to the hand of Agnes, till his villanies are detected and his machinations defeated by Micawber--how all this comes about, would be a long story to tell. But, as is usual with Dickens, there are subsidiary rills of story running into the main stream, and by one of these I should like to linger a moment. The head-boy, and a kind of parlour-boarder, at Mr. Creakles' establishment, is one Steerforth, the spoilt only son of a widow. This Steerforth, David meets again when both are young men, and they go down together to Yarmouth, and there David is the means of making him known to a family of fisherfolk. He is rich, handsome, with an indescribable charm, according to his friends' testimony, and he induces the fisherman's niece, the pretty Em'ly, to desert her home, and the young boat-builder to whom she is engaged, and to fly to Italy. Now to this story, as Dickens tells it, French criticism objects that he dwells