In treating of the dishonest little legal practitioners Dickens indulges his taste for burlesque humour. Witness the scene in which Dodson and Fogg are visited by Mr. Pickwick, and the two lawyers try to provoke him to commit an assault or to use slanderous language, and Sam Weller without ceremony drags his master out of the office. Mr. Sampson Brass is also a subject of rollicking humour, as is his sister, the fair Sally. Witness the scene where Brass visits Quilp at his wharf on the Thames and is compelled to drink spirits neat and almost boiling, and is made sick by the pipe the little monster makes him smoke; or when Brass, aided by Quilp’s wife and mother-in-law, is writing a description of the supposed corpse of his missing client, and recalls Quilp’s characteristics, “his wit and humour, his pathos and his umberella.” I confess I do not quite understand how Brass was able to get Kit imprisoned; our author’s law appears a little stagey. I should say that type of lawyer had disappeared; but I once did come across a Dodson and Fogg, though a pianoforte, not a widow, was the cause of my costly experience. Let us now turn from the somewhat painful abuses which Dickens denounces to a more cheerful subject, that of Parliamentary elections. Here I can speak frivolously, for I am one of those who have grave doubts whether a good or a bad system of election, in my country at any rate, matters much, for choose them how you will, the representatives of the people never seem to represent anything but their own private interests. Let us take Mr. Pickwick’s experiences at Eatandswill, which is, I believe, the now disfranchised borough of Sudbury in Suffolk, about fourteen miles from Bury St. Edmunds, whither Mr. Pickwick started on his expedition to thwart the plans of Mr. Jingle, and had his famous experience at the young ladies’ school. His friend, Mr. Perker, was, you will recollect, the agent of the Hon. Samuel Slumkey. “‘Spirited contest, my dear Sir,’ said Mr. Perker to Pickwick. ‘I am delighted to hear it,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rubbing his hands. ‘I like to see sturdy patriotism, on whatever side it is called forth;--and so it’s a spirited contest?’ ‘O yes,’ said the little man, ‘very much so indeed. We have opened all the public houses in the place, and left our adversary nothing but the beer shops--masterly stroke of policy that, my dear Sir, eh?’”