touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate.”  This was the keynote of “The Chimes.”  He intended in it to strike a great and memorable blow on behalf of the poor and down-trodden.  His purpose, so far as I can make it out, was to show how much excuse there is for their shortcomings, and how in their errors, nay even in their crimes, there linger traces of goodness and kindly feeling.  On this I shall have something to say when discussing “Hard Times,” which is somewhat akin to “The Chimes” in scope and purpose.  Meanwhile it cannot honestly be affirmed that the story justifies the passion that Dickens threw into its composition.  The supernatural machinery is weak as compared with that of the “Carol.”  Little Trotty Veck, dreaming to the sound of the bells in the old church tower, is a bad substitute for Scrooge on his midnight rambles.  Nor are his dreams at all equal, for humour or pathos, to Scrooge’s visions and experiences.  And the moral itself is not clearly brought out.  I confess to being a little doubtful as to what it exactly is, and how it follows from the premises furnished.  I wish, too, that it had been carried home to some one with more power than little Trotty to give it effect.  What was the good of convincing that kindly old soul that the people of his own class had warm hearts?  He knew it very well.  Take from the book the fine imaginative description of the goblin music that leaps into life with the ringing of the bells, and there remain the most excellent intentions—­and not much more.

Such, however, was very far from being Dickens’ view.  He had “undergone,” he said, “as much sorrow and agitation” in the writing “as if the thing were real,” and on the 3rd of November, when the last page was written, had indulged “in what women call a good cry;” and, as usually happens, the child that had cost much sorrow was a child of special love.[19] So, when all was over, nothing would do but he must come to London to read his book to the choice literary spirits whom he specially loved.  Accordingly he started from Genoa on the 6th of November, travelled by Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice—­where, such was the enchantment of the place, that he felt it “cruel not to have brought Kate and Georgy, positively cruel and base";—­and thence again by Verona, Mantua, Milan, the Simplon Pass, Strasbourg, Paris, and Calais, to Dover, and wintry England.  Sharp work, considering all he had seen by the way, and how effectually he had seen it, for he was in London on the evening of the 30th of November, and, on the 2nd of December, reading his little book to the choice spirits aforesaid, all assembled for the purpose at Forster’s house.  There they are:  they live for us still in Maclise’s drawing, though Time has plied his scythe among them so effectually, during the forty-two years since flown, that each has passed into the silent land.  There they sit:  Carlyle, not the shaggy Scotch terrier with the melancholy eyes that we were wont to see in his later days, but close shaven and alert; and swift-witted Douglas Jerrold; and Laman Blanchard, whose name goes darkling in the literature of the last generation; and Forster himself, journalist and author of many books; and the painters Dyce, Maclise, and Stanfield; and Byron’s friend and school companion, the clergyman Harness, who, like Dyce, pays to the story the tribute of his tears.