There is a mania for Mr. Dickens's readings in the
United States-of such force and magnitude that the day breaks,—we hope not so cold a day as we have had recently in England, —on hundreds of persons waiting in file at the box office to be supplied with tickets. True, numbers of these were not intending auditors, but only brokers of tickets, who hoped to sell them again at scarcity prices,—but still a great many of them were real buyers, and even the speculators showed what the demand must be. And yet the hall was generally not filled, and many of the tickets not sold, for the same reason for which the speculators for a rise in time of famine have sometimes destroyed great quantities of grain,—namely, that the artificial scarcity caused by a withholding or destruction of a considerable number of tickets, so enhances the price of the remaining ones as to more than cover the value of the tickets destroyed or withheld. It is an odd mania. Mr. Dickens reads his comic parts admirably, is inimitable in " Mr. Toots," and very great in " Serjeant Buzfuz." Still it is a mild order of amusement for which to suffer martyrdom. Reading really cannot much enhance the humour of his most humorous touches, for Mr. Dickens's humour is too broad to need any of the interpretation of a subtle delivery. And his pathos is excruciating. It is an open question whether his reading of the death of little " Paul Dombey " does not more than balance the pleasure of his reading of " Mr. Toots." Instead of one ticket rewarding a dozen hours' waiting, we think a dozen tickets would barely reward one hour's waiting,—that is, to the lima fide consumer. Of course, money is money, and Americans only know what a night " sub jove frigido" should fetch in cash.
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