tin, 'that your married life may perhaps be miserable, full of bitterness, and most unhappy?' Merry looked down again; and now she tore the grass up by the roots. 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. 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: 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!' "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.' "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 giddiness. It may have been the wanton act of a light head. Is that so?' "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.' "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 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 of all truth and probability, the woman who married her husband chiefly to spite her sister; who, according to the testimony of her friends, had no heart; 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. change is that she has married a man The only reason for which 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. ments. To this strongly marked intel His mind is in frag 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 ignoenabled him to summon at will the most rant. ludicrous and grotesque images, and has given vigor to whatever can be done in parts to his isolated sketches, for example, and to his descriptions of simple passion. On the other hand, it has prevented him from either constructing a story or penetrating a character. It is due to this that his views, both of life and morals, are imperfect and of the first impression, being, in fact, just what would occur off hand to any ordinary warm-hearted person who had not reflected on the subject. With these characteristics it is particularly unfortunate that he should have attempted to express himself on questions of State. Mr. Tupper's poetry, Dr. Cumming's theology, Mr. Samuel Warren's sentiment, are not worse than Mr. Dickens's polities. And this is saying a good deal. He seems, however, to have thought otherwise. It is difficult to name any important subject which has arisen within the last quarter of a century on which he has not written something. Imprisonment for Debt, the Poor Laws, the Court - of Chancery, the Ten Hours' Bill and the relations of Workman and Employer, Administrative Reform, the Ecclesiastical Courts, the Civil Service Examinations, and National Education, have all been illustrated, criticised, and adjudicated upon. We should be sorry to say that he has not pointed out many defects in the working of these institutions; it was not difficult to do so; but he has uniformly overstated the case, he has often not understood it, and never has he pointed out any remedy. It may be added that his criticism has generally come too late. The account of the Fleet prison in Pickwick was published in the year in which the Act for the amendment of the Insolvent Laws was passed. The Poor Laws had just been improved when Oliver Twist exposed the horrors of the workhouse system. The description of Mr. Bounderby and the hands of Coketown closely followed the last of a series of statutes regulating the management of factories. Jarndyce and Jarndyce might or might not have been true in the time of Lord Eldon, but it bears about as much relation to the present practice of the Court of Chancery as to that of the Star Chamber. It "Ordinary people," says Addison, "are so dazzled with riches, that they pay as much deference to the understanding of a man of estate as of a man of learning, and are very hardly brought to regard any truth, how important soever it be, which is preached to them, if they know that there are several people of £500 a-year who do not believe it." We may safely acquit Mr. Dickens of this particular form of error. He is so far from thinking a man to be any better because he is rich, that he thinks he can hardly be good except he be poor. Such an opinion, directly and indirectly enforced by so powerful a writer, cannot fail of harm. We fear that it has helped to widen the breach, already sufficiently great, which separates the two classes. It is scarcely an excuse to say that our author's bias proceeds from a desire to help the unfortunate and to relieve the oppressed. There is no question as to the excellence of his intentions. But good intentions do not absolve one from the necessity of considering the truth of an opinion or the result of proclaiming it. And sympathy is not exactly the instrument by the use of which a right judgment is insured on complicated and difficult questions. Mr. Dickens, however, is so impressed with the importance of cultivating the feelings, that he is led to infer that, if the feelings are right, the judgment is not likely to be wrong. And thus, whatever has the appearance of being hard and unsympathetic, is the object of his most particular aversion. To people who do not understand the province of political economy, that science certainly has a somewhat uncompromising and forbidding aspect. Accordingly Mr. Dickens runs full tilt against it, apparently because it does not happen to be the same thing as moral philosophy. "What is the first principle of this science?" asks the schoolmaster in Hard Times. "To do unto others as I would they should do unto me," replies the model child; and we are expected to agree with this absurd answer. Hard-hearted economists tell us that if a man's means only allow him to keep four children at a certain level of comfort, he has no right to have eight. Mr. Dickens immediately de scribes a man who has nine children, who is very poor and very happy, and extremely good; and he thinks he has settled 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 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 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. 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). 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 But here our knowledge ends. All Chronicles. We see the solemn call to that comes later is wrapt in legend and his work as the spokesman of the Lord, tradition. Jewish writers tell us that he protested against the sins of Manasseh and was put to death with a singular refinement of cruelty, and Christian commentators 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 twentysix 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 prominence given in the king's elegiac writing, when he had been sick and had recovered from his sickness," to the 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." 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 significance. Even when the hopes had 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 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 all, as with an ornament, And bind them on thee, as a bride doeth." -49: 18. "As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, So shall thy God rejoice over thee."-62: 5. 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. |