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Merry looked down again; and now she tore the grass up by the roots.

She perfectly understands her father's tin, 'that your married life may perhaps be game with regard to old Martin Chuz- miserable, full of bitterness, and most unzlewit, and she plays it unhesitatingly happy? 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.

"My dear Mr. Chuzzlewit, what shocking words! Of course, I shall quarrel with him; 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:

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"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.'

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, ac quire 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 of all truth and probability, the woman who married her husband chiefly to spite her sister; who, according to the testi

"Not forced, persuaded, or controlled, said Martin, thoughtfully. And that's true, I see. There is one chance yet. You may have lapsed into this engagement in very gid-mony of her friends, had no heart; diness. It may have been the wanton act of a light head. Is that so?'

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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.'

"Has it ever occurred to you,' said Mar

whose head, as she confesses herself, was a perfect balloon-throwing aside at once the ingrained selfishness and meanness of nearly thirty years, becomes in less than two months a model of uncomplaining endurance and self-denying af fection. 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 constantly presented to us in the works of this remarkable writer. His mind is in frag

ments.

lectual quality may be traced both his To this strongly marked intelcharacteristic 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

rant.

enabled him to summon at will the most ludicrous and grotesque images, and has "Ordinary people," says Addison, given vigor to whatever can be done in "are so dazzled with riches, that they parts-to his isolated sketches, for ex- pay as much deference to the understandample, and to his descriptions of simple ing of a man of estate as of a man of passion. On the other hand, it has pre- learning, and are very hardly brought to vented him from either constructing a regard any truth, how important soever story or penetrating a character. It is it be, which is preached to them, if they due to this that his views, both of life know that there are several people of £500 and morals, are imperfect and of the first a-year who do not believe it." We may impression, being, in fact, just what safely acquit Mr. Dickens of this particwould occur off hand to any ordinary ular form of error. He is so far from warm-hearted person who had not re- thinking a man to be any better because flected on the subject. With these char- he is rich, that he thinks he can hardly acteristics it is particularly unfortunate be good except he be poor. Such an that he should have attempted to ex- opinion, directly and indirectly enforced press himself on questions of State. Mr. by so powerful a writer, cannot fail of Tupper's poetry, Dr. Cumming's theol- harm. We fear that it has helped to ogy, Mr. Samuel Warren's sentiment, widen the breach, already sufficiently are not worse than Mr. Dickens's poli- great, which separates the two classes. tics. And this is saying a good deal. It is scarcely an excuse to say that our He seems, however, to have thought author's bias proceeds from a desire to otherwise. It is difficult to name any help the unfortunate and to relieve the important subject which has arisen with- oppressed. There is no question as to in the last quarter of a century on which the excellence of his intentions. But he has not written something. Imprison- good intentions do not absolve one from ment for Debt, the Poor Laws, the Court the necessity of considering the truth of of Chancery, the Ten Hours' Bill and an opinion or the result of proclaiming the relations of Workman and Employ-it. And sympathy is not exactly the iner, Administrative Reform, the Ecclesias- strument by the use of which a right tical Courts, the Civil Service Examina- judgment is insured on complicated and tions, and National Education, have all difficult questions. Mr. Dickens, howbeen illustrated, criticised, and adjudicat-ever, is so impressed with the impored upon. We should be sorry to say that tance of cultivating the feelings, that he he has not pointed out many defects in is led to infer that, if the feelings are the working of these institutions; it was right, the judgment is not likely to be not difficult to do so; but he has uni- wrong. And thus, whatever has the formly overstated the case, he has often appearance of being hard and unsympa not understood it, and never has he thetic, is the object of his most particupointed out any remedy. It may be lar aversion. To people who do not unadded that his criticism has generally derstand the province of political econcome too late. The account of the omy, that science certainly has a someFleet prison in Pickwick was published in what uncompromising and forbidding the year in which the Act for the amend- aspect. Accordingly Mr. Dickens runs ment of the Insolvent Laws was passed. full tilt against it, apparently because it The Poor Laws had just been improved does not happen to be the same thing as when Oliver Twist exposed the horrors moral philosophy. "What is the first of the workhouse system. The descrip- principle of this science?" asks the tion of Mr. Bounderby and the hands schoolmaster in Hard Times. "To do of Coketown closely followed the last unto others as I would they should do of a series of statutes regulating the unto me," replies the model child; and management of factories. Jarndyce and we are expected to agree with this abJarndyce might or might not have been surd answer. Hard-hearted economists true in the time of Lord Eldon, but it tell us that if a man's means only allow bears about as much relation to the pres- him to keep four children at a certain ent practice of the Court of Chancery level of comfort, he has no right to have as to that of the Star Chamber. It eight. Mr. Dickens immediately de

scribes a man who has nine children, who | have happened, and he has made a powis very poor and very happy, and ex- erful use of them. The instinctive horror tremely good; and he thinks he has set- of Mr. Guppy on finding a lump of tled the question. But lest any linger-grease on his sleeve, before he had any ing doubt should remain, he clenches his suspicion where it came from, is very argument by the reverse picture. "Thom- finely conceived. Now all this would as Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities have passed without remark, had it not a man of facts and calculations-a man been that the author insisted on its sciwho proceeds upon the principle that entific accuracy;* upon which Mr. Lewes twice two is four and nothing over, and pointed out that spontaneous combustion who is not to be talked into allowing does not as yet rank among the accepted for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, truths of science. In a preface to a sir; peremptorily Thomas. With a rule later edition of Bleak House, Mr. Dickand a pair of scales, and the multiplica- ens delivers himself as follows: tion 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 сар. 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 spontaneously 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

"I have no need to observe that I do not and that before I wrote that description I wilfully or negligently mislead my readers, 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 Transactions.

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.

of Hosts in the vision, full of awe and sor row, 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 inTHE death of Hezekiah forms a divid-dependence against the overwhelming ing-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

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.

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

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"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 thought of his doing a father's work, mention, among the heroes of faith, of should his life be spared, in the training those who " were sawn asunder" (Heb. of his child, indicates either that that 11:37). A wilder fable* reports that the child was as yet unborn or still in his ostensible ground of the sentence was the infancy. His passionate craving for charge of blasphemy in having said that life appears in this light with a nobler he had "seen the Lord" (Isaiah 6: 1), aspect: 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

would have been hailed by Isaiah at the Such a marriage, we may well believe, time as likely to be fruitful in blessing. All its circumstances would acquie in the light of his hopes a new and mystical

been disappointed he would yet turn to
them as suggesting the fittest imagery
for the fuller and diviner hopes which
still remained. Throughout the later
chapters this thought recurs again and
again in varied aspects:

"I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
My soul shall be joyful in my God;
For he hath clothed me with the garments
of salvation,

He hath covered me with the robe of right

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*See the article " Manasseh," in Dr. Smith's later. Dictionary of the Bible.

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