both belonged to the time in which a
mob could rise, in which a mob could conquer. No growth of intellectual
science or of moral cowardice had made it impossible to fight in the
streets, whether for the republic or for the Bible. If we wish to know
what was the real link, existing actually in ultimate truth, existing
unconsciously in Dickens's mind, which connected the Gordon Riots with
the French Revolution, the link may be defined though not with any great
adequacy. The nearest and truest way of stating it is that neither of
the two could possibly happen in Fleet Street to-morrow evening.

Another point of resemblance between the two books might be found in the
fact that they both contain the sketch of the same kind of
eighteenth-century aristocrat, if indeed that kind of aristocrat really
existed in the eighteenth century. The diabolical dandy with the rapier
and the sneer is at any rate a necessity of all normal plays and
romances; hence Mr. Chester has a right to exist in this romance, and
Foulon a right to exist in a page of history almost as cloudy and
disputable as a romance. What Dickens and other romancers do probably
omit from the picture of the eighteenth-century oligarch is probably his
liberality. It must never be forgotten that even when he was a despot in
practice he was generally a liberal in theory. Dickens and romancers
make the pre-revolution tyrant a sincere believer in tyranny; generally
he was not. He was a sceptic about everything, even about his own
position. The romantic Foulon says of the people, "Let them eat grass,"
with bitter and deliberate contempt. The real Foulon (if he ever said it
at all) probably said it as a sort of dreary joke because he couldn't
think of any other way out of the problem. Similarly Mr. Chester, a
cynic as he is, believes seriously in the beauty of being a gentleman; a
real man of that type probably disbelieved in that as in everything
else. Dickens was too bracing, one may say too bouncing himself to
understand the psychology of fatigue in a protected and leisured class.
He could understand a tyrant like Quilp, a tyrant who is on his throne
because he has climbed up into it, like a monkey. He could not
understand a tyrant who is on his throne because he is too weary to get
out of it. The old aristocrats were in a dead way quite good-natured.
They were even humanitarians; which perhaps accounts for the extent to
which they roused against themselves the healthy hatred