She perfectly understands her father's game with regard to old Martin Chuzzlewit, and she plays it unhesitatingly and well. At length she meets a man who is, without exception, the most despicable ruffian that Mr. Dickens ever held up to the execration of his readers. He makes love to her sister, and ends by abruptly proposing to herself. He has money, and she accepts him. [January, Merry looked down again; and now she tore the grass up by the roots. words! Of course, I shall quarrel with him; "My dear Mr. Chuzzlewit, what shocking I should quarrel with any husband. Married people always quarrel, I believe. But as to being miserable, and bitter, and all those dreadful things, you know, why I couldn't be absolutely that, unless he always had the best of it; and I mean to have the best of it Here are her views, a week before her marriage, on the duties and responsibil-myself. I always do now,' cried Merry, nod ities of that state: "Are you forced into this match? Are you insidiously advised or tempted to contract it, by any one? I will not ask by whom; by any one?' "No,' said Merry, shrugging her shoulders, 'I don't know that I am.' 666 "Don't know that you are! Are you?' 'No,' replied Merry. 'Nobody ever said anything to me about it. If any one had tried to make me have him, I wouldn't have had him at all.' "I am told that he was at first supposed to be your sister's admirer,' said Martin. “Oh, good gracious! My dear Mr. Chuzzlewit, it would be very hard to make him, though he is a monster, accountable for other people's vanity,' said Merry. And poor dear Cherry is the vainest darling!' ding her head, and giggling very much; 'for I make a perfect slave of the creature." " They are married. Jonas Chuzzlewit is certainly not a model husband. From the antecedents of the lady we are quite prepared to find that she makes good her promise not to allow him always to have the best of it. But Mr. Dickens appears to have thought that, although he had painted Jonas in the blackest colors, and drawn him in the most repulsive form, that was scarcely enough. He still wanted a little contrast to heighten the effect. And he wished to show how character may be developed independently of circumstances, and may, even on the shortest notice, acquire a bent the very opposite of that which those circumstances would tend to produce. So, to the unbounded astonishment of the reader, and in defiance "Not forced, persuaded, or controlled, who married her husband chiefly to spite of all truth and probability, the woman said Martin, thoughtfully. And that's true, her sister; who, according to the testiI see. There is one chance yet. have lapsed into this engagement in very gid-mony of her friends, had no heart; diness. It may have been the wanton act of whose head, as she confesses herself, was a light head. Is that so?' a perfect balloon-throwing aside at once the ingrained selfishness and meanless than two months a model of uncomness of nearly thirty years, becomes in plaining endurance and self-denying af fection. "It was her mistake then?' "I hope it was,' cried Merry; 'but all along, the dear child has been so dreadfully jealous, and so cross, that, upon my word and honor, it's impossible to please her, and it's no use trying.' 666 You may My dear Mr. Chuzzlewit,' simpered Merry, 'as to lightheadedness, there never was such a feather of a head as mine. It's a perfect balloon, I declare! You never did, you know!' "He waited quietly till she had finished, and then said, steadily and slowly, and in a softened voice, as if he would still invite her confidence: "Have you any wish-or is there anything within your breast that whispers you may form the wish, if you have time to think-to be released from this engagement?' "Again Miss Merry pouted, and looked down, and plucked the grass, and shrugged her shoulders. No. She didn't know that she had. She was pretty sure she hadn't. Quite sure, she might say. She didn't mind it.' The only reason for which change is that she has married a man whom she always despised; who is a coward and a bully, and on the highroad to become a murderer. We have illustrated at some length the mental habit which is most constantremarkable writer. His mind is in frag ly presented to us in the works of this ments. To this strongly marked intel lectual quality may be traced both his characteristic excellences and his charac teristic defects. Inability to discern the relations of things, aided by a fancy fertile and plastic in a high degree, has | is all very well meant, but very igno difficult questions. Mr. Dickens, how- scribes a man who has nine children, who is very poor and very happy, and extremely good; and he thinks he has set tled the question. But lest any lingering doubt should remain, he clenches his argument by the reverse picture. "Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities a man of facts and calculations-a man who proceeds upon the principle that twice two is four and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir; peremptorily Thomas. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure out any parcel of human nature and tell you exactly what it comes to." Now, Mr. Gradgrind has two children only; he is rich and miserable. We can say no other of Mr. Dickens's political economy, and no worse, than that it is on a par with Mr. Ruskin's. Indeed, he is always impatient of scientific restraint.. Spontaneous combustion is just one of the subjects which might be expected to be attractive to a writer with a taste for melodrama. There is something sug. gestive and mysterious in the notion of a man setting fire to himself. The surrounding circumstances are all of a kind which admits of effective grouping, and although we do not believe that the the ory is now maintained by any single scientific authority, there is a popular feel ing that it is an institution and a privilege which ought not to be taken from us. Accordingly, in Bleak House, a man of the name of Krook is predestined to this form of death. Krook is an eccentric man, much addicted to brandy, living alone in a garret near Chancery Lane, and with a habit of keeping important papers in his cap. With him an appointment is made for twelve o'clock one night by an attorney's clerk of the name of Guppy. Mr. Guppy goes at the appointed hour, and finds the room full of smoke, the window panes and furniture covered with a dark greasy deposit, and some more of this deposit lying in a small heap of ashes on the floor before the fire. Krook has spon taneously burned himself. We are bound to admit that Mr. Dickens has introduced with great fidelity all the circumstances which have been actually observed in the cases in which this death is said to have happened, and he has made a powerful use of them. The instinctive horror of Mr. Guppy on finding a lump of grease on his sleeve, before he had any suspicion where it came from, is very finely conceived. Now all this would have passed without remark, had it not been that the author insisted on its scientific accuracy;* upon which Mr. Lewes pointed out that spontaneous combustion does not as yet rank among the accepted truths of science. In a preface to a later edition of Bleak House, Mr. Dickens delivers himself as follows: "I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers, and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in letters, who published an account of it at lished at Rome. The appearances beyond all Verona in 1731, which he afterwards repubrational doubt observed in that case, are the appearances observed in Mr. Krook's case. The next most famous instance happened at Rheims six years earlier; and the historian in that case is Le Cat, one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France. . . . I do not think it necessary to add to these notaauthorities which will be found at page 27, ble facts, and that general reference to the vol. ii., the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received." We think it evident that Mr. Dickens entirely misconceives the point in issue. The dispute is not as to the facts, but as to their explanation. No one doubts that certain persons have been burned to death under circumstances not perfectly accounted for. The testimony of Bianchini and Le Cat may be perfectly trustworthy as far as the appearances they actually observed are concerned, and it may be absolutely valueless as regards their explanation. On the latter point, indeed, it is not likely to be worth much, for the simple reason that they both lived several years before the theory of com *Bleak House, vol. ii. p. 27. bustion was understood. And there is a simplicity which is very refreshing in the faith which is placed in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transac tions. It is hard to be obliged to find fault with Mr. Dickens. We owe him too much. He is a man of genius; in many respects rarely gifted. He has exceptional powers of observation and description, great imagination, and an intuitive tact in appreciating many of the more delicate shades of passion. On the other hand, his intellect is, we will not say ruled, but crushed and dwarfed by his emotional faculties. Partly from a defective education, and partly from a constitutional bias, he seems unable to take either an extensive or an intensive view of any subject; neither grasping it as a whole, nor thoroughly exhausting any single part. His writings show the same union of strength and weakness; his plots inartificial, his genesis of character rude and unphilosophic, his literary execution oscillating with tolerable evenness between the intensely vulgar and commonplace, and passages of the most striking beauty. We cannot think that he will live as an English classic. He deals too much in accidental manifestations and too little in universal principles. Before long his language will have passed away, and the manners he depicts will only be found in a Dictionary of Antiquities. And we do not at all anticipate that he will be rescued from oblivion either by his artistic powers or by his political sagacity. Good Words. THE OLD AGE OF ISAIAH. BY REV. E. H. PLUMPTRE, M.A., PROF. OF DIVINITY AT KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON. THE death of Hezekiah forms a dividing-point in the life of the great prophet of glad tidings between what we know with certainty and the obscurities of conjecture and tradition. Up to that point we trace his history, partly through his own writings, partly through what is recorded of him in the Books of Kings and Chronicles. We see the solemn call to his work as the spokesman of the Lord of Hosts in the vision, full of awe and sorrow, in the year that King Uzziah died, the insight then given him into the evils that were eating into the nation's life, the foresight of the penalties sure to follow upon those evils (6: 1-13.) After a period of comparative tranquillity under Jotham, he comes before us in full activity, when the weakness and wickedness of Ahaz were wearying both men and God (7: 13). He rebukes king and people for their falsehood and cowardice; bids them look on without fear at the attempt of the kings of Syria and Israel to depose the dynasty of David and to set up an unknown ruler, some son of Tabeal, as their own creature in its place (7: 4-6); warns them of the coming flood of fierce invaders from Assyria, and tells them that, while it will sweep away utterly the nations of which they were most afraid (7: 8), it would also be in God's hands an instrument to punish them and make their land, the land of Judah, desolate (7: 1725). With the reign of Hezekiah the brightest phase of his life begins. The king is young, and he is his chosen friend and counsellor. We trace his influence in the restored worship, the revived unity of national life, the glorious Passover, the zeal against idolatry and its defilements, perhaps also in the thoroughness which did not shrink from the work of reform even when it involved the destruction of a relic so venerable and, as it might seem, so sacred, as the Brazen Serpent (2 Kings 18: 1-8; 2 Chron. 29:1;30:27). When the armies of Sennacherib fill men's minds with terror it is to him that king and people turn, and from his lips comes the assurance of a marvellous deliverance (2 Kings 19:2; 2 Chron. 32: 20; Isaiah 37). When the king is sick unto death he is at once prophet and physician (2 Kings 20; Isaiah 38.) When Hezekiah, in the glory and state of his later years, is tempt ed to court the alliance of the rising king dom of Babylon, just asserting its independence against the overwhelming power of Assyria, the prophet, faithful to the last, rebukes even the devout and good king, warns him of the coming judgments, and bids him trust in no arm of flesh, but in the might of the Lord of Hosts (2 Kings 20: 12-19; Isaiah 39). But here our knowledge ends. All that comes later is wrapt in legend and tradition. Jewish writers tell us that he thought of his doing a father's work, should his life be spared, in the training of his child, indicates either that that child was as yet unborn or still in his infancy. His passionate craving for life appears in this light with a nobler aspect: "The living, the living he shall praise thee, The father to the children shall make known thy truth." protested against the sins of Manasseh | prominence given in the king's elegiac and was put to death with a singular re-writing, when he had been sick and had finement of cruelty, and Christian com- recovered from his sickness," to the mentators find a reference to this in the mention, among the heroes of faith, of those who "were sawn asunder" (Heb. 11:37). A wilder fable* reports that the ostensible ground of the sentence was the charge of blasphemy in having said that he had " seen the Lord" (Isaiah 6: 1), that the king's baseness was aggravated by the fact that his mother was the prophet's daughter. It is now proposed to fill up the gap thus left from notices scattered, fragmentary, incidental, in what may well be described as the second volume of Isaiah's writings, the great closing series of his prophecies which, in our present division, fills the last twenty-significance. Even when the hopes had six chapters of the book that bears his name. It is possible, I believe, to reconstruct out of those fragments the personal history of the man, and much of the his tory of a time of which we otherwise know but little. Once again the pictures of the past, long obscured and faded, will grow clear, and the Old Age of Isaiah will come before us with a new completeness. At the death of Hezekiah, the prophet must have been already far advanced in life. Sixty-one years had passed since that vision in the temple in the year that King Uzziah died, and he could hardly have been under twenty when he entered on an office that called for so much energy and insight. What had been the last great interests of the old man of fourscore during the reign of the king who loved and honored him? The later chapters of the first part of his works supply the answer. They were (1) the prospect, long delayed, of an heir to the throne of David; (2) the vision, long familiar to the prophet's mind, and recently revived, of a calamity about to fall at no distant period on both king and people-a life of exile in the far lands watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates. (1.) Manasseh was but twelve years old at his accession, and it is natural to infer that Hezekiah's marriage with his mother had taken place comparatively late in life. The name of that mother is given as Hephzi-bah (2 Kings 21: 1). The Such a marriage, we may well believe, would have been hailed by Isaiah at the time as likely to be fruitful in blessing. All its circumstances would acquire in the light of his hopes a new and mystical been disappointed he would yet turn to "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, He hath covered me with the robe of right eousness, As a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, And as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels."-61: 10. "As I live, saith the Lord, Thou shalt surely clothe thee with them "As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, And that there may be no doubt what marriage is in his thoughts, he turns, with his characteristic fondness for finding a deep significance in names (as e.g., in Immanuel, 7: 14; Shear-jashub, 7: 3; Maher-shalal-hash-baz,* 8: 3), to that of the queen whose espousals he had wit nessed: "Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; Neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate : But thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah (‘my delight is in her '), * Another remarkable instance will be noticed *See the article " Manasseh," in Dr. Smith's later. Rahab also becomes, in a text mis-transDictionary of the Bible. lated, and much mis-quoted, both nomen et omen |