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MEN OF CHARACTER.

73757

BY

DOUGLAS JERROLD.

LONDON:

BRADBURY AND EVANS, 11, BOUVERIE STREET.

1851.

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PREFACE.

THE greater number of these Characters-or, rather, Sketches of Character-originally appeared some sixteen years ago. The incidents of each paper make no pretension to the construction of a complete story: they are rather presented as an endeavouroften, too, a hardy, extravagant one-to illustrate certain moral and personal peculiarities of the heroes (heroes of fewest inches!) with little regard to the elaborate working out of the likeness. Indeed, Men of Character are little other than Men of Outlines; pen-and-ink flourishes; with, possibly, now and then some better trace of human similitude, and now, running into mere grotesque.

Thus, JOB PIPPINS is nothing more than the hero of accident. The plaything, and, finally, the prosperous man of worldly chance. Are there such men? Different readers may haply make different answers. With the writer, however, Job is somewhat of a favourite; from the circumstance that whatever good spirits may be found in him, the sunshine was not reflected from the actual hour of his pen-and-ink parent.

When JACK RUNNYMEDE first appeared, certain social evils and abuses, of which he is made the hero and the sufferer, were in hourly operation. They have passed away; made the pleasant

sacrifices to a better time, informed with a more humanising spirit. Thus, as says Orion

"The circle widens as the world spins round."

The incidents of Jack's sailor life-with the characters that beset it—are little, very little coloured. And now most of them belong to the past. Englishmen are no more likely again to experience the horrors of the Tower Tender, than the doings of the Argonauts.

ADAM BUFF may haply have descendants: men with a sort of topsy-turvy prosperity, that, by the turn of accident, transforms the naked necessities of their condition, into their self-denying and rewarded virtues.

A MATTHEW CLEAR may continue to see his way; though -so have we proceeded in the work of pulling down and casting aside there is no longer a pillory, in which the culprit is framed for an example to the lookers-on; the admonished beholders taking supplementary law into their own hands, as gathered from the gutter and the dust-bin.

JOHN APPLEJOHN, at the present time, would hardly need to sit upon the stone step of a stony sponging-house, awaiting the advent of a messenger sent "to search the books." It might, too, be most difficult even impossible-for John, in 1851, to fall into the hilarious company of lords and gentlemen bound together to break the peace: yet, when John was in his literary growth, such nobles and gentry were in the flesh, and—in the newspapers.

Finally-for it needs not to run through the file-BARNABY PALMS is confessed to be a sad, mean rascal. But let him not be thought a mere knavery of fiction: an unreal villain curdled from the sourness of invention.

In the treatment of some of the subjects of this volume there

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