ship, and don't break down or give it up because I seem to come out rather rough at the first, dear old man. Read it through and stand by me.

nor any one

"You do not know else scarcely for the matter of thatthat I have a half-sister, the sweetest, prettiest, dearest, and most innocent little creature that ever shed sunshine on a household! She didn't shed it long on ours though, for as soon as she was old enough she was sent away to earn her own living, which she did by becoming governess in a Quaker's family at York. I was fond of her fond in my odd way- - but I never saw much of her, as I was always rambling about, and when, after a return from an absence of many months, I heard that Alice was married to an elderly man, named Claxton, who was well off, and lived in comfort near London, I thought it was a good job for her, and troubled myself but little more about

the matter.

- very

"But one day, no matter how, my suspicions were aroused. I made inquiries, and to cut the matter shortI discovered that the respectable Mr. Claxton, to whom I had heard Alice

was married, was a city merchant,

whose real name was Calverley, and

who had already a wife. I never doubted Alice for a moment; I knew the girl too well for that. I felt certain this old scoundrel had deceived her, and, as they say in the states, I went

for him.'

"There's no use denying it, Hum

old Calverley will go away from his word; in the first place, because notwithstanding this rascally trick he has played poor Alice, he seems a decent kind of fellow, and in the next, because he would be afraid to, so long as I am to the fore. But something might happen to him or to me, and then the paper would be useful.

"Here is the whole story, Humphrey, confided to your common sense and judgment, to act with as you think best, by "Your old friend,

"TOM DURHAM."

"I, John Calverley, merchant of Mincing Lane and Great Walpole Street, do hereby freely confess that having made the acquaintance of Alice Durham, to whom I represented myself as a bachelor of the name of Claxton, I married the said Alice Durham at the church of Saint Nicholas, at Ousegate, in the city of York, I being, at

the same time, a married man, and

having a wife then, and now, living And I solemnly swear, and hereby set forth, that the said Alice Durham, now known as Alice Claxton, was deceived by me, had no knowledge of my former marriage, or of my name being other than that which I gave her, but fully and firmly believes herself to be my

habit of creeping back to his dismal home with sorrow in his heart, or when Pauline sat watching and plotting in the solitude of her chamber. Since her second husband's death, Mrs. Calverley seemed to have eschewed even the small amount of society which she had previously kept; the heavy dinner parties were given up, and the only signs of so-called social intercourse were the fortnightly meetings of a Dorcas Club which was held under Mrs. Calverley's auspices, and at which several elderly ladies of the neighborhood discussed tea and scandal

under the pretence of administering to the necessities of the poor. At other times, the mistress of the house led a life which was eminently solitary and self-contained. She read occacalled at the circulating library, she sionally, it is true, but when she brought away with her, for her amusement or edification, no story in which under the guise of fiction the writer had endeavored to portray any of the varieties of shifting human nature which had come beneath his ken, no poem glowing with passion and ardor or sweetly musical with melodious numbers. Hard story-books of travel through districts with immense unpronounceable names, tales of missionary baldest, and least educated style, reenterprise set forth in the coldest, lieved with frequent interpolations of theological vernacular, reviews which had once been potential but whose feeble echoes of former trumpet

what was I to do? I was always so infernally hard up! I brought the old boy to his bearings, and made him confess that he had acted a ruffian's part. And then I ought to have killed him I suppose! But I didn't. He pointed out to me that Alice was in perfect ignorance of her real position, that to be informed of it would probably be her death. And then he is a tremendously knowing old bird - he made certain suggestions about improving my financial position and getting me regular employment, and giving me a certain sum of money down, so that somehow I listened to him more quietly than I was at first disposed to do. Not that I wasn't excessively indignant on Alice's account! Don't make any mistake about that. I told old Calverley that he had done her a wrong which must be set right so far as lay in his power, and I made him write out a paper at my dictation and sign it in full, with his head-clerk as witness to the signature. Of course the clerk did not know the contents of the document, but he saw his master sign it, and put his own name as witness. This was done two days ago, just at the time when they had been writing a lot of letters in the office about my taking up their agency in Ceylon, and no doubt he thought it had something to do with that. I shall inclose that paper in this letter, and you can use it in case of need. Not that I think

"JOHN CALVERLEY.

"Witness, Thomas Jeffreys,

"Head clerk to Messrs Calverley and Co."

"That appears to me decisive as an assertion of Alice's innocence," said Martin Gurwood, looking round as Humphrey finished reading.

"To most persons it would be so," said Statham; "but Mrs. Calverley, with whom we chiefly have to deal, is not of the ordinary stamp. It will be advisable, however, I think, that we should see her at once, taking this document with us. If Madame Du-if Mrs. Durham's suspicions of Mr. Wetter are well founded, he will not have uttered his bark without being prepared to bite, and it is probably to Mrs. Calverley that he will first address himself."

66 Do you wish me to accompany

you

? " asked Pauline. "No," said Statham, "I think you had better return home.”

"I think so too," said Martin; "your sister may be expecting you.”

Her sister! In her broken condition it was some small comfort to Pauline to hear the acknowledgment of that connection from Martin's lips.

ears, polemical discussions on religious questions and priestly biographies lives of small men containing no proper precept, setting no worthy example. these were Mrs. Calverley's favorite reading. The butler declared that she read nothing at all, that though these books were brought from Mudie's on the back seat of the carriage and were afterwards displayed on the drawing-room table, one at a time occupying the post of honor on his mistress' lap she never so much as glanced at them, but sat staring with her steely blue eyes straight in front of her; a state of things which, rigorously persisted in, afflicted the butler on his own statement, with a disease known to him as "the creeps," and which was considered generally so uncanny throughout the lower regions, that, had not the wages been good and the table liberal, the whole household would have departed in a body.

About four o'clock on a dull afternoon in the very early spring, Mrs. Calverley was seated in her drawing-room in that semi-comatose state, which inspired her domestics with so much terror. Some excuse, however, was to be made for her not attempting on the present occasion to read the book which lay idly in her lap, the time being "between the lights" as the phrase goes, when the gathering gloom of night aided by the ever present thickness of the London atmosphere blots

butler, pointing in an imbecile way first at Mrs. Calverley's cap and then at his own head.

"Ah," said Mrs. Calverley, with a deep groan, and shaking her head to and fro, for she never missed an opportunity of making capital out of her portunity of making capital out of her condition before the servants; "one who has known grief eh, James? And she wants to see me?"

"Asked first if you lived here mum, and then was very particular in wishing to see you. A pleasant-spoken young woman, mum, and not like any begging-letter impostor or coves - or people, I mean, of that sort."

"You can light the gas, James, and then show the lady up. No, stay, show her up at once, and do not light the gas until I ring." Since she had known Madame Du Tertre, Mrs. Calverley had taken some interest in her own personal appearance, and not having seen her toilet glass since the morning, she had an idea that she might have become somewhat dishevelled.

The butler left the room and presently returned, ushering in a lady who, so far as Mrs. Calverley could make out in the uncertain light, was young, of middle height, and dressed in deep mourning.

The mistress of the mansion motioned her visitor to a seat, and making her a stiff bow said, " You wish to speak to me, I believe."

out the sun's departing rays before the time recorded in the almanac. It was very seldom indeed that Mrs. Calverley suffered her thoughts to dwell upon any incident of her immediately passed life. On what had happened during her girlhood, when she was the spoiled and petted heiress, on certain episodes in the career of jolly George Gurwood, her first husband, in which she had borne a conspicuous part, she was in the habit of bestowing occasional remembrances; but all that concerned her later life she wilfully and deliberately shut out from her mind. And this not from any sting of conscience, for Mrs. Calverley considered herself far too immaculate to be open to any such vulgar consideration, but as she said to herself, because everything of that kind was too near to allow her to form an impartial judgment upon it. It chanced, however, that upon this particcular day, the deceased John Calverley had been frequently present to his widow's recollection. There was nothing extraordinary in this, it arose from the fact that that very morning in looking through the contents of an old trunk which had long since been consigned to the lumber-room, Mrs. Calverley had come upon an old fly-blown water-color drawing of a youth with a falling linen collar, a round jacket and white duck trowsers, a drawing which bore some faint general resemblance to John even as she remembered him. Pondering over this work of art in a dreamy fashion, Mrs. Calverley found herself wondering whether her late husband's mental condition in youth had been as frank and ingenuous as that to be gathered from his physical portrait, and secondly, whether she had not either faultily misapprehended or wilfully misconstrued that mental and moral condition even during the time that she had been acquainted with him. Two or three times later in the day her mind had wandered to the same topic, and now as she sat in the dull drawing-room in the failing light, her thoughts were full on him. It was pleasant, she remembered, though she had not thought so at the time, to be looking forward in expectation of his, return home at a certain hour; pleasant to know that he would probably be detained beyond the appointed time, thereby giving her opportunity for complaint, pleasant to have some one to vent her annoyance upon who would feel it so keenly and reply to it so little. She had not hitherto looked at her loss from this point of view, and she was much struck by the novelty of it, though she had never had any opinion of Mr. Calverley, she was will- "It depends upon what you ask,” ing to admit, that be was not abso-replied Mrs. Calverley, with a sniff. lutely bad-hearted; nay, there were times when

Her reverie was interrupted by the entrance of the butler, who announced that a young lady was below desiring to speak to Mrs. Calverley.

"A lady, what kind of a lady?" "A—a widow, mum, replied the

"I wish to speak with Mrs. Calverley." "I am Mrs. Calverley. What is business? " "Your cently?"

your your husband died re

"Ábout six months ago. How very curious! What is your object in asking these questions?"

"Bear with me pray! Do not think me odd, only answer me what I ask you, my reasons for wishing you to do so are so urgent."

The lady's voice was agitated, her manner eager and unusual. Mrs. Calverley did not quite know what to make of her visitor. She might be a maniac, but then why her interest in the deceased Mr. Calverley? Another and, to her idea, a much more likely explanation of that mystery arose in Mrs. Calverley's mind. Who was this hussy who was so inquisitive about other women's husbands? She should like to see what the bold-faced thing looked like. And she promptly rang the bell to summon James to light the gas.

"You will answer me, will you not? said the pleading voice.

"Tell me then Mrs. Calverley your husband, was he very fond of you?"

66

Yes," said the visitor, sadly, "that I can fully understand. Did you ever see or hear of his partner, Mr. Claxton?"

"I never saw him," said Mrs. Calverley. "I've heard of him often enough, oftener than I like. It was he that persuaded Mr. Calverley to going into that speculation about those ironworks which Mr. Jeffreys can make nothing of. But he wasn't a partner in the house, there are no partners in the house, only some one that Mr. Calverley knew in the City, and probably a designing swindler, for Mr. Calverley was a weak man, and this Claxton

"Mr. Claxton was the best man that ever walked this earth!" cried Alice, breaking forth, "the kindest, the dearest, and the best."

Hey day," cried Mrs. Calverley with a snort of defiance. "And who may you be who know so much about Mr. Claxton, and who want to know so much about Mr. Calverley? That is right James," she added, "light the gas, ," and then, she said, in a lower tone, "I shall be better able to judge the kind of visitor I have."

The gas was lighted and the servant left the room. Mrs. Calverley rose stiffly from her chair and advanced towards Alice who remained seated.

"What is this," she said, in a stony voice," and who are you? coming here tricked out in these weeds, to make inquiries and to utter sentiments at which modest women would blush. Who are you, I say ?

But while Mrs. Calverley had been speaking, Alice had looked up, and her eyes had fallen upon a picture hanging against the wall. A big crayon head of John, her own old John, just as she had known him, with the large bright eyes, the heavy thoughtful brow, and the lines round the mouth somewhat deeply graven. For an instant she bent her head before the picture, the next with the tears welling up into her eyes, and in a low soft voice without the slightest exaggeration in tone or manner, she said,

"You ask me who I am, and I will tell you." Then pointing up to the portrait, "I am that man's widow."

"What!" screamed Mrs. Calverly. "Do you know who that was?"

No," said Alice, "except that he was my husband."

66

Why, woman!" exclaimed the outraged mistress of the house, in a torrent of rage, "that was Mr. Calverley!"

save

you will, he had neither lot nor part with you! You tell me that he loved you, was devoted to you - it is a lie! You talk of your love for him, and that may be indeed, for he was meant to be loved! But he was mine, all mine ah, my dear John; ah, my darling old John I"

She broke down utterly here and fell on her knees before the picture, in a flood of tears.

"Well, upon my word" cried Mrs. Calverley, "this is a little too much! No one who knows me would imagine for a minute that I should condescend to quarrel about Mr. Calverley with any trolloping miss who chooses to come here! And no one who knew Mr. Calverley, selfish and neglectful as he was, and without the least consideration for me, would suspect him to have been such a Blue Beard or a Mormon as you endeavor to make him out! How dare you come here with a tale like this! How dare you present yourself before me with your brazen face, and your well prepared story, unless it is as I suppose, to induce me to give you hush money to stop your mouth. Do you imagine for an instant that I am to be taken in by such a ridiculous plot? Do you imagine for an instant that "

quietly, "you do us all, and more especially this lady, great injustice!' “Oh, very likely " said Mrs. Calverley, sarcastically, "very likely she is right and I am wrong! She has just told me that she was Mr. Calverley's wife, and no doubt you will bear her out that that is correct and that I have been dreaming for the last twelve years."

"If you will permit me to speak, madame," said Humphrey Statham in his deep tones, "I think I can prove to you that this lady has, or imagines she has, grounds for the statement which she has made; and that while you have been deeply injured, her injuries are worse, and more serious than yours."

"You will hear Mr. Statham, if you please, mother," said Martin Garwood. "I am here to attest the truth of all that he will say."

arm

Mrs. Calverley dropped the which she had extended in monition, and Alice ran to place herself by Martin Gurwood's side.

"Save me from her!" she cried, shrinking on his arm, "Save me from this woman!"

"Do not be afraid, Alice," said Martin, endeavoring to calm her. "We thought to find you here, but hoped to be in time to prevent your suffering any annoyance. Mother," he added, turning to Mrs. Calverley, "there is

some mistake here."

"There must be some mistake indeed," observed Mrs. Calverley, with great asperity," when I find my son, a clergyman of the Church of England, taking part against his mother with a woman who, take the most charitable view of it, is only fitted for Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum." "Not to take part against you mother? Surely

Well, I don't know what you call it," cried Mrs. Calverley, "or whether you consider it quite decorous to keep your arm round that young person before your mother's face! Or whether" -here the worthy lady gave a short nod towards Statham 66 gentlemen with whom I have but slight personal acquaintance think themselves justified in coming into my house uninvited! I am an old-fashioned person and I dare say don't understand these matters, but in my time they would not have been tolerated."

and manfully of the irremediable wrong done to Alice and of the manner in which her life had been sacrificed; and finally he produced the document in John Calverley's handwriting, which had just been discovered, to show how completely she had been made the victim of a fraud.

ley with great placidity, "it might have been imagined that as my son, and leaving out all question of his clerical position, he would have adopted another course; but such do not appear to have been his views. Let me tell him," she cried, turning upon Martin with sudden fierceness, "that henceforward he is no son of mine! That I renounce him and leave him to shift for himself; he has no longer any expectations from me! On certain conditions I promised to share all with him now, and leave him my sole heir at my death. But I revoke what I said; I am mistress of my own fortune and will continue to be so. Not one penny of it shall go to him.”

"You are of course at liberty to do what you like with your fortune, mother," said Martin quietly, "and it would never occur to me for an instant "

"Stay," interrupted Statham, taking his friend by the arm and pointing to Alice, "there is no use in prolonging this painful discussion, and Mrs. Claxton is completely exhausted."

"You are right" said Martin, rising from his seat, "we have been some.. what thoughtless in thus overtaxing her strength, and will take her home at once!" Then advancing, he said, in a low tone, "Mother, will you see me to-morrow?"

"Mr. Martin Gurwood" said Mrs. Calverley, in a clear, cold voice, “with my own free will I will never look upon you again! And though the name that I bear is that of one who was a scoundrel, I am glad that it is not the name which is disgraced by you!"

And thus those two parted.

Sitting bolt upright on her chair and slowly rubbing her mittened hands one over the other, Mrs. Calverley listened to Statham's speech. When he stopped she bridled up and said with asperity, "A very pretty story indeed, very well concocted and arranged between you all. Of course, may believe as much of it as I choose! There's no law, I imagine, to compel me to swallow it whole, even though my son, a clergyman of the Church of England, sits by and nods his head in confirmation of his friend. And don't imagine, please, that I am at all surprised at what I hear about Mr. Calverley! I hear it now for the first time, but I always imagined him to be a bad and wicked man, given up to selfishness and debauchery, and quite without the power of appreciating the blessings of a well-ordered home. The young woman needn't start! I am not going to demean myself by engaging in any controversy with her, and wish rather to ignore her presence. But I will say " said Mrs. Calverley, drawing herself up,66 but I will say that I had not expected to find that my son was sanctioning these proceedings and conniving at the disgrace which was being heaped upon me!"

"Mother!" cried Martin Gurwood, appealingly.

"It might," continued Mrs. Calver

are

"without incumbrance." However, it is plain that people with children must live somewhere, and sometimes artifice has to be employed to enable them to do so. On All Souls'. Day a Parisian gentleman, seeking fresh rooms, was asked whether he had any children. The man answered with tears that they were "all in the cemetery." Satisfied with this reply, the landlord accepted him as a tenant; but the agreement between them was no sooner signed than four children appeared on the scene, with their nurse. It was true they had been to the cemetery but they had come back again.

M. RENAN, who is at present on a tour in Italy, is said to be engaged on a new work to prove that the fiddling Emperor Nero was Antichrist.

THE TENSION IN CHARLES DICKENS.

A GREAT Sculptor, commenting to the present writer on the physical features of the bust of Dickens, drew attention especially to "the whip-cord,” "the race-horse tension," in all the muscles; - all the softer and vaguer tissues in the face and bust were pruned away, and only the keen, strenuous, driving, purpose-pursuing elements in it left. The second volume of Mr. Forster's "Life of Charles Dickens" brings out that criticism with extraordinary force. It is like reading the biography of a literary race-horse. The tension and strain go on through the whole ten years, 1842-52, which the book covers. There is no rest in the man's nature, even when he is professedly resting. He once proposed to himself to write a book like "The Vicar of Wakefield." He could just as easily have written a play like "Hamlet" or the Odes of Horace. He had not a touch of Goldsmith's ease and leisurely literary air. His nerves were never relaxed. A great element in the force of his genius, and a very great element in its principal limitations, is due to their constant strain, which spoils almost all the sentiment, makes it theatrical and always on the stretch, and not unfrequently lends a forced ring to the greatest of all his faculties, his humor. The biography is, of course, most amusing reading. Whether the moral tension is justified or in excess, it is always there, and therefore even if we are annoyed and repelled, our attention never flags. But Mr. Forster is not as fastidious as he might have been in inserting the would-be comic letters of his friend, and perhaps on that very account, he gives a picture that is the more complete, complete in its unconscious as well as in its conscious contribution to our knowledge of the great humorist. Dickens is always on the double-quick march. If he hits the exact mark and his humor is at its best, it is still humor marching sharply on to the particular end in view. You can see its steady, swift current, none the less easily for the enormous wealth of detail which he snatches from all sides wherewith to enrich it. If he fails to hit the mark, and talks excited nonsense, as in the silly letter about his passion for the Queen in the first volume, and many a little note in this, it is nevertheless all in the same vein, jocosity stretching eagerly towards a given aim, though the aim is falsely taken. Consider, for instance, this answer to an invitation to dinner sent by Maclise, Stanfield, and Mr. Forster:

"DEVONSHIRE LODGE, January 17th, 1844. "FELLOW COUNTRYMEN! - The appeal with which you have honored me, awakens within my breast emotions that are more easily to be imagined than described. Heaven bless you. I shall indeed be proud, my friends, to respond to such a requisition. I had withdrawn from Public Life I fondly thought forever to pass the evening of my days in hydropathical pursuits, and the contemplation of virtue. For which latter purpose, I had bought a looking-glass. But, my friends, private feeling must ever yield to a stern sense of public duty. The man is lost in the invited guest, and I comply. Nurses, wet and dry; apothecaries; mothers-in-law; babies; with all the sweet (and chaste) delights of private life; these, my countrymen, are hard to leave. But you have called me forth, and I will come.

"Fellow countrymen, your friend and faithful servant,
"CHARLES DICKENS."

The idea is forced and the gayety is unnatural, but the whole letter is written up to the idea, and you see the straining whipcord even in that bit of laborious comedy. The proclamation about the piratical republication of his works, put forth on the eve of the appearance of "Nickleby" (pp. 76, 77 of this volume), is another bit of labored pleasantry of the same kind, a violent straining after a pseudo-comic idea. But his true and most marvellous efforts of humor have all the same swift-running current in them, though of course, when the tide is triumphant, and sweeps all sort of rich spoils upon its surface, there is not the same sense of effort, — by which we usually mean force not quite adequate to its purpose. The exquisite illustrations which he gathers from all quarters of the sick

and monthly nurse's world to enrich the technical vocabulary, and fill up to overflowing the strictly professional mould, of Mrs. Gamp's conversation and life, abundant and amazing in their abundance and in the variety and subtlety of their shades as they are, are all collected to convey the same drift, and all suggest to us a keen eye on the stretch, ranging over its various stores of mouldy associations, to pile up monthly-nurseisms of every kind. Mr. Forster quotes, for instance, in this volume one of the very best and also the very first of Mrs. Gamp's speeches :

"Mrs. Harris,' I says, at the very last case as ever I acted in, which it was but a young person, Mrs. Harris,' I says, 'leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and don't ask me to take none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged.' — 'Mrs. Gamp,' she says to me, 'if ever there was a sober cretur to be got at eighteen pence a day for working-people, and threeand-six for gentlefolks'-night-watching, said Mrs. Gamp, with emphasis, being a extra charge, you are that inwallable person.'' Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'don't name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my fellow-creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears 'em.""

Now, any one can see that the wonderful humor here is mainly due to the delightful intensity and extravagance with which Dickens could abandon his imagination to the train of associations proper to a thoroughly selfish and mouldy person of this class, who takes a positive professional pride in laying out her fellow-creatures. It is the singleness of his eager and strenuous search, as he follows up every cross-thread of association that his enormous power of observation had given him, never deviating for a moment from the two leading ideas, — selfish greediness with a cant of benevolence, and professional detail of all kinds, that helps him to pile up the character into so wonderful an embodiment and illustration of these two notions. We are not in the least degree endeavoring to explain away his genius, but only to show that one feature of it, - the constructive power of his mind, his accurate and omnivorous observing faculty being taken for granted, - depended on the extraordinary tension he could put on one or two leading threads of association, by the help of which he drew from his resources what they, and they alone, demanded. No man was ever able to stretch one or two lines of conception so tightly, and to exclude so completely all disturbing influences from the field of his vision. It was the source of his power and the source of the limitations on his power. It produced his great successes, Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Moddle, Micawber, Toots, and a hundred others. It produced also, when applied to types of character that would not bear so keen a tension of one or two strings, all the failures due to overstraining, like Little Nell, Carker, Mrs. Dombey, Dombey, and a hundred others. You see the strain of the race-horse in all he did; and in creations which, with his wonderful wealth of observation, could be produced under sharp tension of the one or two humorous conceptions devoted to each creation, he succeeded triumphantly; while wherever the creation wanted a leisurely, reflective, many-sided mood of mind he failed. In sentimental passages, the string is al most always strained until it cracks. Mr. Forster is, of course, compelled to admire Little Nell, the pathetic elements in the Christmas Stories, and so on. But these are the repelling things to all true lovers of Dickens, rather than the attractions. Even in the death of little Paul Dombey, perhaps his closest approach to true pathos, you feel painfully the undue stretch of the sentiment, and turn away a little sickened. It is much worse in the case of most other of his efforts of the same kind; and Mr. Forster's "Life" shows that it must have been so, from the ostentation of Dickens's own feelings in speaking of these efforts. He tells you how much he weeps over them, how cut up he is with his own pathos, till you are quite sick of the glace and effort. When he is speaking of his really great efforts of humor he is altogether, natural. You have no feeling then that he is whipping himself up to the point, and proud of being able to reach it.

But it is on the practical side of Dickens's life that this nervous tension comes out most curiously. What a fume

he falls into when the sale of Chuzzlewit does not come up to his expectations, and his publishers hint at putting in force the clause empowering them to retain £50 out of the £200 allowed for the expenses of authorship on each number: "I am so irritated," he wrote to Mr. Forster, rubbed in the tenderest part of my eyelids with bay-salt, by what I told you yesterday, that a wrong kind of fire is burning in my head, and I don't think I can write. Nevertheless, I am trying. In case I should succeed, and should not come down to you this morning, shall you be at the club or elsewhere after dinner? I am bent on paying the money." In his disappointment and fear of failure, he determines at once to go abroad, and these sort of resolves with him always hardened rapidly into fixity which no dissuasion would affect. When the "Christmas Carol" does not yield as he had hoped, we have the same sort of outburst again:

"Such a night as I have passed!' he wrote to me on Saturday morning, the 10th of February. I really believed I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever. I found the "Carol accounts awaiting me, and they were the cause of it. The first six thousand copies show a profit of £230! And the last four will yield as much more. I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear. What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment! My year's bills, unpaid, are so terrific, that all the energy and determination I can possibly exert will be required to clear me before I go abroad; which, if next June come and find me alive, I shall do!'"'

When the pirates are defeated at law, but being men of straw cannot pay the costs, so that Dickens has to pay his own costs, we have the same excessive tension of imperious disappointment:

"My feeling about the is the feeling common, I suppose, to three fourths of the reflecting part of the community in our happiest of all possible countries; and that is, that it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law. I shall not easily forget the expense, and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the 'Carol' case, wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed. *** It is useless to affect that I don't know I have a morbid susceptibility of exasperation, to which the meanness and the badness of the law in such a matter will be stinging to the last degree."

His very idleness, as Mr. Forster well says, was "strenuous," like his work. He walked eighteen miles in four hours and a half in the full heat of a glowing summer's day simply as a sort of relief for the strain of his nerves. On another occasion, Mr. Forster says:

"But he did even his nothings in a strenuous way, and on occasion could make gallant fight against the elements themselves. He reported himself, to my horror, thrice wet through on a single day, dressed four times,' and finding all sorts of great things, brought out by the rains, among the rocks on the seabeach."

When he is living in Genoa, in the middle of winter, he dashes over to London just to try the effect of reading "The Chimes" to his intimate friends. Between Milan and Strasburg he was in bed only once for two or three hours at Fribourg, and had sledged over the Simplon through deep snow and prodigious cold. His dash into the Editorship of the Daily News and out of it within three weeks was highly characteristic of the high pressure of his nervous decision. Apropos of this matter, Mr. Forster says very truly that "in all intellectual labors his will prevailed so strongly when he fixed it on any object of desire, that what else its attainment might exact was never duly measured, and this led to frequent strain and uncommon waste of what no man could less afford to spare." Everything he did, he did with this imperious resolve to let his volition take its own way, and it led him no doubt into some of the greatest mistakes of his life. He liked to have everything just as he has imagined it. His mind strained intensely towards the particular ideal he had summoned up in his fancy; nothing else would satisfy him for a moment.

Mr. Forster has a very fair laugh at M. Taine for his wonderful blunder in thinking that the maudlin youth whom Miss Charity Pecksniff captured, and whom she lost at the very altar, was meant for "a gloomy maniac," and one so powerfully drawn as to make us "shudder." But there is something quite just in M. Taine's general criticism that Dickens does draw the madness of "fixed ideas" with extraordinary power. It is the secret of his marvellous descriptions of murderous feeling, of Jonas Chuzzlewit's for example, also of Sykes's wanderings after the murder of Nancy, and, again, of the murderous schoolmaster in "Our Mutual Friend." And it was precisely the extraordinary capacity of his own mind for the tension of fixed ideas which enabled him to do this so powerfully. Intellectually, indeed, he hardly understood anything else, - though some of the fixed ideas on to which he tacked his pictures were so delightfully limp, as in poor Mr. Module's and Dick Swiveller's case, and many others, that the fixity of the leading thought escapes the reader. As was the author, so was the man. Mr. Forster's admirable book will certainly carry one trait of Dickens right home to every devourer of his biography, that all the veins and muscles in Dickens's nature were always on the stretch towards some eager end. A mind with less rest and less easy play in it, in spite of all its real fun and laughter, is hardly conceivable.

HOW I FOUND LIVINGSTONE.

A NEWSPAPER correspondent who had witnesssed some exciting scene in the American civil war would occasionally economize time by taking a special train and writing his narrative in the course of his homeward journey. Mr. Stanley's account of his travels seems to have been composed under similar influences. His return to England is still fresh in our memories, and we know how much he has since had to go through in his capacity of lion, and moreover of lion with a certain doubt attaching to his claims. He has, however, found time already to produce a portly volume containing the record of his travels. A gentleman who writes in such hot haste is not likely to produce a work of great literary value. Mr. Stanley indeed has the facility of expression of the genuine correspondent, but he has scarcely aimed at more than the production of a series of lively newspaper articles. He has of course fallen into some of the faults common to all such writers. His book would have been much better if it had been half its present length, and there are some passages in it which would have been better for summary excision instead of compres sion. He may do well to be angry, but he should not have indulged in personality. Dr. Kirk may deserve blame for his conduct towards Dr. Livingstone, and the members of the English expedition may deserve some severe criticism; but it was scarcely necessary to treat us to personal descriptions of Dr. Kirk's private life, or to lively portraits of Messrs. Dawson, Henn, and Newman. Still less can we see any excuse for the ridicule directed against the inoffensive Bishop Tozer. Mr. Stanley, in short, has descended rather too much to the style of the interviewer a new product of American journalism to which we are not quite reconciled. We may add that, as Mr. Stanley ends by proclaiming peace with the Geographical Society in a postscript, it would have been as well if he could have cut out some of the previous remarks, in which his bitterness

Mr.

perhaps justifiable in itself— appears rather too plainly. The excellent Dr. Wolf published a list of errata to his travels, including such corrections as this for "that execrable scoundrel So-and-So" read "Mr. So-and-So." Stanley seems to have adopted a device of a similar nature. He gives us both the abuse and the courteous withdrawal; perhaps it would have been a better mode of withdrawal if he had simply omitted the abuse.

We are willing, however, to follow his example. We have found fault with him; and we are now prepared to admit that we are quite reconciled, and to add that he has