time.

I am not clear, and I never have been clear, respecting the canon of fiction which forbids the interposition of accident in such a case as Madame Defarge's death. Where the accident is inseparable from the action and passion of the character; where it is strictly consistent with the entire design, and arises out of some culminating proceeding on the part of the individual which the whole story has led up to; it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another question) to bring about such a catastrophe, I have the positive intention of making that half comic intervention a part of the desperate woman's failure; and of opposing that mean death, instead of a desperate one in the streets, which she would n't have minded, to the dignity of Carton's. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in the fitness of things." In all this, Dickens shows himself an admirable, interpretative critic, - at least of his own work. Nothing could be better than his reasons, except the masterly way in which he carried out the design which the reasons fully justify.

66

As a mere story, founded on the Revolution of '89, it excels in terseness, vividness, and interest any romance of Alexandre Dumas, on the same period; and at the same time it includes attractive moral elements, of which Dumas never had the slightest conception. Were it not that the romance is artistically constructed, demanding some exercise of mind on the reader's part to be thoroughly appreciated, there seems to be no reason why its popularity should not have outrun that of every sensational" novel of the time, and have taken by storm the public which reads Reynolds and Miss Braddon, as well as the public that reads Thackeray, Bulwer, and Charles Reade. Yet "A Tale of Two Cities" is hardly known by thousands who have "Pickwick" and "Nickleby" almost by heart; and among these thousands are many intelligent as well as many unintelligent readers of Dickens. The man or woman is to be envied who reads this "Tale of Two Cities" for the first time, as it has every quality of interest calculated to stir the dullest imagina

tion, and stimulate the most jaded heart. In the style and treatment of the story there is also present that element of the serious grotesque, mounting at times to the gigantesque, which fascinates us in the romances of Victor Hugo.

The characters are generally subordinated to the incidents, yet the story is still rich in various characterization. Dr. Manette, his daughter Lucie, and the Defarges; Miss Pross, and Solomon her brother; Jerry Cruncher, not forgetting his distressed wife and hopeful son; Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton; and the sleek, sneering, cruel, voluptuous, blandly inhuman Marquis, abhorred by everybody, and specially abhorred by his nephew who is in the line of succession to his rank and land, a rank degraded by crime, and land blasted by infamous exactions on its tenants to pay the debts of profligacy and riot; all these are indisputable characters, each having an individual interest. It may be said, however, that Charles Darnay, the philanthropic nephew of the monster aristocrat, a man who becomes the central object of interest in the story, - the lover and husband of Lucie Manette, who wins the greatest blessing that life affords, a tender and intelligent wife, in whom affection rises to the height of genius, -is drawn with the faintest colors of the artist's pencil. Brave, honorable, noble as he is, his qualities are didactically, rather than dramatically expressed, and one feels that he is insufficiently individualized when his prominence among the characters is considered. the particular persons of the tale, whether attractive or repulsive, whether strongly or feebly delineated, are all drifted to and fro in the storm of events, representing the uprising of an oppressed people, blind and mad in selecting both its favorites and victims. In this revolutionary tempest Darnay and his wife, with all their surroundings, are but autumn leaves, swept hither and thither by a hurricane which regards neither reason nor justice in its wide, remorseless sweep.

Still,

The character which rises above all storms of circumstance in this exigency is Sydney Carton. It is useless, he knows, to save the victim doomed to the guillotine by any demonstration

of his innocence. All he can do is to take the victim's place. He succeeds in this by an exercise of skill, forethought, and elaborate contrivance, which other men may have equaled in attempts to save their individual existence, but which none ever employed with similar coolness and intelligence in the effort of sacrificing it. He has sworn to Lucie, for whom he has a far-off, ideal affection, altogether removed from any stain of the sensuality and recklessness on which his own turbid life had been wrecked, that if the time ever came when he could do her a service, it should be done at any cost to himself. Accordingly, when all means have been exhausted to save her husband's life, he steps in, not precipitately but deliberately; not in a rash, wild way, but in a way which calls forth all his alertness of intellect, and contrives to be Darnay's substitute for the justice of the guillotine. The scene in which this sacrifice is consummated is pathetic and noble, beyond almost any other in Dickens's works.

Richard Grant White, a writer who has wandered over a wide field of criticism, from an intelligent scrutiny of the text of Shakespeare to the minutest questions springing up from the popular use or misuse of common words, - was the first critic who called attention to the singular beauty, the exceptional sublimity of the character of Sydney Carton. After weighing his words, which at first seem exaggerated, one is impelled at last to agree with him, that Carton stands out as one of the noblest characters in the whole literature of fiction. The more the character is studied, the more we are impressed with the depth of Mr. White's criticism. As to the work itself, he says, that "its portrayal of the noble-natured castaway makes it almost a peerless book in modern literature, and gives it a place among the highest examples of literary art. . . . . The conception of this character shows in its author an ideal of magnanimity and of charity never surpassed. There is not a grander, lovelier figure than the self-wrecked, self-devoted Sydney Carton, in literature or history; and the story itself is so noble in its spirit, so grand and graphic in its style, and filled with a pathos so profound

....

and simple, that it deserves and will surely take a place among the great serious works of imagination." The only remark to be made in qualification of this eulogy is, that Carton's failure in life had made him not only indifferent to life, but heartily disgusted with it; there was no prospect of possible self-amendment rising before his eyes to check in the least his design of self-immolation; and he seized on the heroic form of suicide, presented to him by the distress of the woman he loved, as a means at once of blessing her existence and of extinguishing his

own.

The Paris scenes in this "Tale of Two Cities' are more vivid and impressive than those which occur in London, yet the English incidents are not without special merit and interest. Most English novelists have exerted their talents in describing legal trials, affecting the lives or fortunes of their leading personages. Perhaps the account, in Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year," of the trial by which Tittlebat Titmouse wins the estates of Mr. Aubrey, is not the least exciting of the incidents of that novel, even to unprofessional readers; and Wilkie Collins so delights in this method of provoking curiosity that a suspicion prevails that he pays heavy fees to eminent lawyers to guide him in matters of law, when, as in "Man and Wife,” and “The Law and the Lady," much of the interest depends on the decisions of judges and the verdicts of juries. Dickens delights both in the comic and serious presentation of judicial proceedings; but, throughout his works, it would be vain to find a parallel in force and interest to the account of the trial of Charles Darnay for high treason, as narrated in the present romance. The period is 1780, when Great Britain was at war with France and her own colonies. The opening speech of the Attorney General, the examination and cross of the government spies, the reluctant testimony of Lucie Manette, the speech of the prisoner's counsel, and all the minor incidents of the varied scene, are presented in such a way as to include in a small space, every element of interest that can enter into a State Trial.

The English trial, in which Charles Darnay so narrowly

escapes the brutal penalties then inflicted on the wretch convicted of the crime of high treason, is a good offset to his trial, some years after, before the Revolutionary Tribunal during the French Reign of Terror. The English court of justice does all it can to have him hanged, drawn, and quartered, with all the unutterable atrocities connected with a traitor's execution; the French Tribunal only seeks to have him put out of existence by the quickest and least painful method that human wit has devised. The question of the abolition of capital punishment is one on which there is a great difference of opinion; but certainly if the death penalty for crime is to be exacted, Dr. Guillotine's handy machine furnishes the most humane way of putting criminal existence into non-existence with "certainty and despatch."

At the period to which this story refers, a certain forcible assurance, amounting in many cases to positive brutality, was rather a help than a hindrance to success at the British bar; and Mr. Stryver, the counsel for Charles Darnay, is a shining example of the insolent legal braggart and bully of the time, elbowing his way through crowds of competitors into lucrative practice, with the prospect of ending his career as Chief Justice, or Lord Chancellor, if his flexible political principles happen at the right moment to attract the party in power. The most remarkable individual of the whole class was Lord Thurlow, who reached the highest positions in his profession by sheer impudence, rather than by true commanding force of character; and Stryver is Thurlow razeed, but still starting on the same path which eventually led his model to political and judicial emiThurlow, when he needed the law he lacked, had many jackals to hunt it up for him; Stryver, as we know him, has only one, Sydney Carton, and Sydney really gains every case which gives reputation to his employer, by his power of extracting" the essence from a heap of statements," — of getting at the very pith and marrow of every subject brought before his keen and powerful intellect. Thurlow was famous for the contemptuous way in which he spoke to and of his assistants.

nence.