Weller. It would be difficult to find a comparison indicating a more
completely futile instinct for literature. Tony Weller and Yuba Bill
were both coach-drivers, and this fact establishes a resemblance just
about as much as the fact that Jobson in "Rob Roy" and George Warrington
in "Pendennis" were both lawyers; or that Antonio and Mr. Pickwick were
both merchants; or that Sir Galahad and Sir Willoughby Patten were both
knights. Tony Weller is a magnificent grotesque. He is a gargoyle, and
his mouth, like the mouths of so many gargoyles, is always open. He is
garrulous, exuberant, flowery, preposterously sociable. He holds that
great creed of the convivial, the creed which is at the back of so much
that is greatest in Dickens, the creed that eternity begins at ten
o'clock at night, and that nights last forever. But Yuba Bill is a
figure of a widely different character. He is not convivial; it might
almost be said that he is too great ever to be sociable. A circle of
quiescence and solitude such as that which might ring a saint or a
hermit rings this majestic and profound humourist. His jokes do not flow
upon him like those of Mr. Weller, sparkling, continual, and deliberate,
like the play of a fountain in a pleasure garden; they fall suddenly and
capriciously, like a crash of avalanches from a great mountain. Tony
Weller has the noisy humour of London, Yuba Bill has the silent humour
of the earth.
One of the worst of the disadvantages of the rich and random fertility
of Bret Harte is the fact that it is very difficult to trace or recover
all the stories that he has written.
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