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Among these were John Scott, who afterwards became Lord Chancellor Eldon, and the Welsh lawyer, who afterwards became Lord Chief Justice Kenyon. Taffy," he once said to the latter, "you are obstinate, and give no reasons; now Scott is obstinate too, but he gives reasons, and dashed bad ones they are.” Stryver holds a similar tone of insolent superiority to Carton. William (now generally known as Sir William) Jones wrote to Burke in February, 1783, that it would be madness in the Whigs to continue Thurlow in office. "If you remove him,” he says, "and put the seal in commission, his natural indolence is such that he will give you little trouble, because he will give himself none; but if he continue among you, he will support all those whom you condemn," and "condemn all the measures which you may support." He calls him a Caliban, hating the human species generally, but particularly hating the best speci mens of it, like the Marquis of Rockingham. Dickens does not tell us that Stryver attains to the august position that Thurlow reached; but the brute element in him, the Caliban lowness of sentiment and ferocity of disposition, is clearly indicated; and when this is accompanied with sufficient strength and breadth of brain to "intellectualize" the animal fierceness which underlies it, no legal lion of the Stryver-kind will fail of finding jackals of the Carton-kind to furnish him with precedents which he may be too indolent to collect, or arguments which he may be too incompetent to originate. Meanwhile Stryver's inalienable native gifts, his face of brass and tongue of thunder, his pushing, elbowing, unscrupulous way of forcing himself into prominence, regardless of honor and incapable of shame, insures him a success from which sensitive minds and hearts, however richly endowed by nature and culture, would shrink away abashed, considering such success the greatest of calamities.

Much might be said of Jerry Cruncher, one of the queerest of Dickens's humorous creations. By day he is an odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, with his stool outside the door of Tellson's Bank; by night he is a resurrectionist, or, as

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he puts it, an "honest tradesman." When Mr. Lorry discovers his unlawful calling, and suddenly asks him, "What have you been besides a messenger?" Jerry replies, after some cogitation, "Agricultooral character!" His objection to the penalties of high treason, the hanging, quartering, etc, is that they interfere with his nightly agricultural pursuits. "It's hard in the law to spile a man," he says; "it's hard enough to kill a man; but it's wery hard to spile him, sir." His final speech to Mr. Lorry, in which he half justifies the profession he nevertheless promises to abandon, is a very curious piece of rhetoric. After he is told that he disgraces Tellson's by being engaged in such an occupation, Jerry retorts that there are two sides of viewing the matter: "There might be medical doctors at the present hour, a-picking up their guineas where a honest tradesman don't pick up his fardens - fardens! no, nor yet his half fardens — half fardens! no, nor yet his quarter- a banking away like smoke at Tellson's, and a-cocking their medical eyes at that tradesman on the sly, a-going in and going out to their own carriages - ah! equally like smoke, if not more so. Well, that 'ud be imposing, too, on Tellson's." Mr. Cruncher, after sojourning a year in France, has learned some new ideas of the sanctity of human life, and of the sanctity of human bodies after life has departed from them. “A man don't see," he says, "all this here a-goin' on dreadful round him, in the way of subjects without heads, dear me, plentiful enough fur to bring the price down to porterage and hardly that, without havin' his serious thoughts of things." The prayers of his wife, that he formerly called "floppin' agen the business to that degree as is ruinating — stark ruinating!" and which he was accustomed to interrupt by throwing at her whatever heavy articles of boots or brushes happened to be conveniently at hand, now, in his French experience of the Reign of Terror, seemed to acquire a value which he heretofore would have repudiated. Referring to Lucie and her children, he declares to Miss Pross: "Them poor things well out o' this, never more will I do it, never no more!" And if he fails to escape with his life, he is anxious that Miss Pross-who knows noth

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ing of his feats as a resurrectionist, or of his interference with his wife's prayers shall have his words "took down, and took to Mrs. Cruncher through yourself— that wot my opinions respectin' flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I only hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a-flopping at the present time. . . . . Forbid it," Mr. Cruncher proceeded "with additional solemnity, additional slowness, and additional tendency to hold forth and hold out," as any thing wot I have ever said or done should be wisited on my earnest wishes for them poor creeturs now! Forbid it, as we should n't all flop (if it was any ways conwenient) to get 'em out of this dismal risk! Forbid it, Miss! Wot I say, for-BID it!" Jerry seemed much delighted in so perfectly expressing his revived sense of the worth of religion, by capitalizing the second syllable of the last word but one. The reader is left to indulge the hope that Mr. Cruncher, once happily landed in England, will not only allow Mrs. Cruncher to "flop," but "flop" with her, and bring up the unregenerated urchin, his son, to "flop" likewise.

The "Tale of Two Cities" has so much general vigor of style, and is so thoroughly penetrated by the writer's imagination, that it is superfluous to call attention to special felicities of diction, full as the narrative is of pointed and brilliant sentences. What particularly distinguishes it from Dickens's other romances is the enthralling interest of the story; and in this respect it is hardly exceeded by any novel published during the present century.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES.

IN THREE BOOKS.

BOOK THE FIRST. RECALLED TO LIFE.

age

CHAPTER I.

THE PERIOD.

IT was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

A

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to

B

England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But, that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.