by the French maid aforesaid.  But the murder comes too late to save my lady, nay, adds to her difficulties.  She flies, in anticipation of the disclosure of her secret, and is found dead at the graveyard gate.  To such end has the sin of her youth led her.  So once again has Dickens dwelt, not on the passionate side of wrongful love, but on its sorrow.  Now take the other thread—­the Chancery suit—­“Jarndyce versus Jarndyce,” a suit held in awful reverence by the profession as a “monument of Chancery practice”—­a suit seemingly interminable, till, after long, long years of wrangling and litigation, the fortuitous discovery of a will settles it all, with the result that the whole estate has been swallowed up in the costs.  And how about the litigants?  How about poor Richard Carstone and his wife, whom we see, in the opening of the story, in all the heyday and happiness of their youth, strolling down to the court—­they are its wards,—­and wondering sadly over the “headache and heartache” of it all, and then saying, gleefully, “at all events Chancery will work none of its bad influence on us”?  “None of its bad influence on us!” poor lad, whose life is wasted and character impaired in following the mirage of the suit, and who is killed by the mockery of its end.  Thus do the two intertwined stories run; but apart from these, though all in place and keeping, and helping on the general development, there is a whole profusion of noticeable characters.  In enumerating them, however baldly, one scarcely knows where to begin.  The lawyer group—­clerks and all—­is excellent.  Dickens’ early experiences stood him in good stead here.  Excellent too are those studies in the ways of impecuniosity and practical shiftlessness, Harold Skimpole, the airy, irresponsible, light-hearted epicurean, with his pretty tastes and dilettante accomplishments, and Mrs. Jellyby, the philanthropist, whose eyes “see nothing nearer” than Borrioboola-Gha, on the banks of the far Niger, and never dwell to any purpose on the utter discomfort of the home of her husband and children.  Characters of this kind no one ever delineated better than Dickens.  That Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, who had sat for the portrait of Skimpole, was not altogether flattered by the likeness, is comprehensible enough; and in truth it is unfair, both to painter and model, that we should take such portraits too seriously.  Landor, who sat for the thunderous and kindly Boythorn, had more reason to be satisfied.  Besides these one may mention Joe, the outcast; and Mr. Turveydrop, the beau of the school of the Regency—­how horrified he would have been at the juxtaposition—­and George, the keeper of the rifle gallery, a fine soldierly figure; and Mr. Bucket, the detective—­though Dickens had a tendency to idealize the abilities of the police force.  As to Sir Leicester Dedlock, I think he is, on the whole, “mine author’s” best study of the aristocracy, a direction in which Dickens’ forte did not lie, for Sir Leicester is a gentleman, and receives the terrible blow that falls upon him in a spirit at once chivalrous and human.