ever Mr. Dickens writes a novel, he makes | If an acquaintance with Latin were made the two or three comic characters just as he might excuse for a similar display, Mr. Dickens and cut a pig out of a piece of orange-peel. In his disciples would undoubtedly consider such the present story there are two comic charac- | conduct as inexcusable pedantry. To show ters, one of whom is amusing by reason of off familiarity with a modern language is not the facts that his name is Jerry Cruncher, very different from similar conduct with rethat his hair sticks out like iron spikes, and spect to an ancient one. that, having reproached his wife for "flopping The moral tone of the Tale of Two Cities down on her knees" to pray, he goes on for is not more wholesome than that of its predseventeen years speaking of praying as "flop-ecessors, nor does it display any nearer apping." If, instead of saying that his hair was proach to a solid knowledge of the subjectlike iron spikes, Mr. Dickens had said that matter to which it refers. Mr. Dickens his ears were like mutton-chops, or his nose observes in his preface-"It has been one of like a Bologna sausage, the effect would have my hopes to add something to the popular been much the same. One of his former and picturesque means of understanding that characters was identified by a habit of staring terrible time, though no one can hope to add at things and people with his teeth, and an- any thing to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's other by a propensity to draw his mustache wonderful book." The allusion to Mr. Carup under his nose, and his nose down over lyle confirms the presumption which the book his mustache. As there are many members itself raises, that Mr. Dickens happened to in one body, Mr. Dickens may possibly live have read the History of the French Revolulong enough to have a character for each of tion, and, being on the look-out for a subject, them, so that he may have one character determined off-hand to write a novel about it. identified by his eyebrows, another by his Whether he has any other knowledge of the nostrils, and another by his toe-nails. No subject than a single reading of Mr. Carlyle's popularity can disguise the fact that this is work would supply does not appear, but certhe very lowest of low styles of art. It is a tainly what he has written shows no more. step below Cato's full wig and lacquered chair It is exactly the sort of story which a man which shook the pit and made the gallery would write who had taken down Mr. Carstare, and in point of artistic merit stands on lyle's theory without any sort of inquiry or precisely the same level with the deformities examination, but with a comfortable convicwhich inspire the pencils of the prolific artists tion that " nothing could be added to its philwho supply valentines to the million at a osophy." The people, says Mr. Dickens, in penny apiece. effect, had been degraded by long and gross misgovernment, and acted like wild beasts in consequence. There is, no doubt, a great deal of truth in this view of the matter, but it is such very elementary truth that, unless a man had something new to say about it, it is hardly worth mentioning; and Mr. Dickens supports it by specific assertions which, if not absolutely false, are at any rate so selected as to convey an entirely false impression. It is a shameful thing for a popular writer to exaggerate the faults of the French aristocracy in a book which will naturally find its way to readers who know very little of the subject except what he chooses to tell them; but it is impossible not to feel that the melodramatic story which Mr. Dickens tells about the wicked marquis who violates one of his serfs and murders another, is a grossly unfair representation of the state of society in France in the middle of the eighteenth century. That the French noblesse had much to answer for

One special piece of grotesqueness introduced by Mr. Dickens into his present tale is very curious. A good deal of the story relates to France, and many of the characters are French. Mr. Dickens accordingly makes them talk a language which, for a few sentences, is amusing enough, but which becomes intolerably tiresome and affected when it is spread over scores of pages. He translates every French word by its exact English equivalent. For example, "Voilà votre passeport" becomes "Behold your passport"

Je viens de voir," "I come to see," etc. Apart from the bad taste of this, it shows a perfect ignorance of the nature and principles of language. The sort of person who would say in English, "Behold," is not the sort of person who would say in French "Voilà;" and to describe the most terrible events in this misbegotten jargon shows a great want of sensibility to the real requirements of art.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES.

in a thousand ways, is a lamentable truth; | man who is accused of being a French spy, but it is by no means true that they could and does his best to show how utterly corrupt rob, murder, and ravish with impunity. and unfair everybody was who took part in When Count Horn thought proper to try the experiment under the regency, he was broken on the wheel, notwithstanding his nobility; and the sort of atrocities which Mr. Dickens depicts as characteristic of the eighteenth century were neither safe nor common in the fourteenth.

the proceedings. The counsel for the crown is made to praise the government spy, who is the principal witness, as a man of exalted virtue, and is said to address himself with zeal to the task of driving the nails into the prisoner's coffin. In examining the witnesses he makes every sort of unfair suggestion which England as well as France comes in for can prejudice the prisoner, and the judge Mr. Dickens' favors. He takes a sort of shows great reluctance to allow any circumpleasure, which appears to us insolent and stance to come out which would be favorable unbecoming in the extreme, in drawing the to him, and does all in his power to get him attention of his readers exclusively to the bad hung, though the evidence against him is weak and weak points in the history and character in the extreme. It so happens that in the of their immediate ancestors. The grand-state trials for the very year (1780) in which fathers of the present generation were, ac- the scene of Mr. Dickens' story is laid, there cording to him, a sort of savages, or very lit- is a full report of the trial of a French spytle better. They were cruel, bigoted, unjust, one De la Motte-for the very crime which ill-governed, oppressed, and neglected in every is imputed to Mr. Dickens' hero. One of the possible way. The childish delight with which principal witnesses in this case was an accomMr. Dickens acts Jack Horner, and says plice of very bad character; and in fact it is What a good boy am I, in comparison with difficult to doubt that the one trial is merely my benighted ancestors, is thoroughly con- a fictitious "rendering" of the other. The temptible. England some ninety years back comparison between them is both curious and was not what it now is, but it was a very re-instructive. It would be perfectly impossible markable country. It was inhabited and pas- to imagine a fairer trial than De la Motte's, sionately loved by some of the greatest men who were then living, and it possessed institutions which, with many imperfections, were by far the best which then existed in the world, and were, amongst other things, the sources from which our present liberties are derived. There certainly were a large number of abuses, but Mr. Dickens is not content with representing them fairly. He grossly exaggerates their evils. It is usually difficult to bring a novelist precisely to book, and Mr. Dickens is especially addicted to the cultivation of a judicious vagueness; but in his present work he affords an opportunity for instituting a comparison between the facts on which he relies, and the assertions which he makes on the strength of them. In the early part of his novel he introduces the trial of a 423

THIRD SERIES.

LIVING AGE.

or stronger evidence than that on which he was convicted. The counsel for the crown said not one word about the character of the approver, and so far was the judge from pressing hard on the prisoner, that he excluded evidence offered against him which in almost any other country would have been all but conclusive against him. It is surely a very disgraceful thing to represent such a transaction as an attempt to commit a judicial murder.

We must say one word in conclusion as to the illustrations. They are thoroughly worthy of the text. It is impossible to imagine faces and figures more utterly unreal, or more wretchedly conventional, than those by which Mr. Browne represents Mr. Dickens' characters. The handsome faces are caricatures, and the ugly ones are like nothing human.

From The Saturday Review, 17 Dec.
AUSTRIA MORIBUNDA.

adamant-it has proved at the first trial a bruised reed. Arms had been provided, the best that the fruits of industry wrung from overtaxed provinces could buy. Nothing was omitted but the men to wield them. The inefficiency of a vast military organization without a heart has been demonstrated for the hundreth time in history. The mountains which an undisciplined peasantry heroically defended under Hofer are receiving the defeated soldiers of Gyulai. When a military despotism has lost its military power what remains? Little but the diamond coat of Esterhazy, which will glitter at a coronation, but will scarcely save a crown.

monarchies, was partly seduced by the example of Bonaparte, and the necessity of opposTHE dangers with which Austria is now ing an equally strong unity for the common contending are not those from which she es- defence to that which he wielded for the comcaped in 1813, or even in 1848. In 1813, she mon ruin. She was seduced still deeper into was fighting against the insolent and rapait by the revolutionary outbreak of 1848. cious tyranny of a foreign pirate-a tyranny Yet the result to her is not less fatal than if odious alike to all her populations, and against the fault had been entirely her own. An emwhich all her populations were ready to lend pire without a nation, on what does she rest? her loyal aid. In 1848, she was fighting in Where is the earth which her giant frame part at least against Red Republicanism, the may touch and rise renewed? The highest fear of which placed the party of order in all aristocracy, as a general rule, are on the side her provinces more or less on the side even of of her government, and it was the toughness a bad and detested government. Yet even in of fibre inherent in this aristocracy that car1848, she but just escaped with life, and prob- ried her through Austerlitz and Wagram, ably would not have escaped at all but for the and enabled her to show something of Roalmost miraculous aid of Jellachich, and the man dignity and tenacity in 1848. But the intervention, not again to be hoped for of Rus- Austrian aristocracy is not, like the Roman, sia. The serpents against which she is now, an aristocracy of great soldiers and great like another Laocoon, wrestling for life, and statesmen. It is an aristocracy of indifferent whose deadly coils rise higher and higher soldiers and great men of pleasure. It was above the head of their victim, are bankruptcy on the army that the empire really leaned, and universal disaffection. Bankruptcy would since it had been divorced from the hearts of not kill her. "A nation," said Metternich, the people. The army seemed a pillar of "never knows its resources till it is bankrupt." This dictum of knavish cynicism would be false of a great commercial country where the life of society depends on credit; but it is true of a merely agricultural country, where a suspension of payment by the government ruins a number of capitalists, mostly foreigners, but does not affect the bulk of the population, who look only to the harvest of the next year. The Austrian government has in fact, repeatedly committed with comparative impunity acts of semi-repudiation which would have given a deadly shock to the sensitive frame of English commercial life. It can also, in its remote provinces, force its paper in a way which shows that, economically speaking, it is placed The reforming statesmen of Austria, if such under a different meridian from ours. That there really be, have not only to reformits finances cannot come round while it has to they have to undo the whole state of things maintain, as at present, a double army, to keep under which they have been trained, and undown its provinces and to defend them, is a der which their power exists. They have to mathematical certainty; but bankruptcy, we restore a happy group of historical accidents repeat, will not kill the Austrian government. finally overthrown ten years ago. They have Universal disaffection probably will. It was to reproduce by an effort of statesmanship the strength of Austria, if she had only known that which a long run of good fortune, aided it, to be an imperial confederation. It is her by instinctive wisdom, could alone produce. weakness to have become a centralized des- Such a task is beyond the power of Metterpotism. While she was content to leave the nichs. But even if Chathams, Turgots, different nations of her empire their own laws Washingtons were there, their inspiration and customs, their local self-government, and would be vain. Austria has a "chivalrous their national life, they were ready to cry, moriamur pro rege nostro. Now that she has madly destroyed their laws and customs, put down their local self-government, and threatened their national life, they are not ready to cry, "Let us die for our bureaucracy." In grasping at the shadow of administrative unity she has lost the substance of willing allegiance. It is due to her to say that into this error she, like other European

young emperor"-a hot-headed and coldhearted young bigot, obstinate, mean, and selfish, incapable of the true wisdom which yields to manifest necessity, and of the frank concession which, in yielding, wins back estranged hearts. And at that "chivalrous young emperor's" ear is a third serpent, subtler and more deadly than the great monsters of bankruptcy and disaffection. Jesuitism is doomed forever to labor with miracu