of all the sorrow consequent upon it; and the ghost he
holds nightly conference with, is the darker presentiment of himself
embodied in those bitter recollections. This part is finely managed. Out
of heaped-up images of gloomy and wintry fancies, the supernatural takes
a shape which is not forced or violent; and the dialogue which is no
dialogue, but a kind of dreary dreamy echo, is a piece of ghostly
imagination better than Mrs. Radcliffe. The boon desired is granted and
the bargain struck. He is not only to lose his own recollection of grief
and wrong, but to destroy the like memory in all whom he approaches. By
this means the effect is shown in humble as well as higher minds, in the
worst poverty as in competence or ease, always with the same result. The
over-thinking sage loses his own affections and sympathy, sees them
crushed in others, and is brought to the level of the only creature whom
he cannot change or influence, an outcast of the streets, a boy whom the
mere animal appetites have turned into a small fiend. Never having had
his mind awakened, evil is this creature's good; avarice, irreverence,
and vindictiveness, are his nature; sorrow has no place in his memory;
and from his brutish propensities the philosopher can take nothing away.
The juxtaposition of two people whom such opposite means have put in
the same moral position is a stroke of excellent art. There are plenty
of incredibilities and inconsistencies, just as in the pleasant _Cricket
on the Hearth_, which one does not care about, but enjoy rather than
otherwise; and, as in that charming little book, there were minor
characters as delightful as anything in Dickens. The Tetterby group, in
whose humble, homely, kindly, ungainly figures there is everything that
could suggest itself to a clear eye, a piercing wit, and a loving heart,
became enormous favourites. Tilly Slowboy and her little dot of a baby,
charging folks with it as if it were an offensive instrument, or handing
it about as if it were something to drink, were not more popular than
poor Johnny Tetterby staggering under his Moloch of an infant, the
Juggernaut that crushes all his enjoyments. The story itself consists of
nothing more than the effects of the Ghost's gift upon the various
groups of people introduced, and the way the end is arrived at is very
specially in Dickens's manner. What the highest exercise of the
intellect had missed is found in the simplest form of the affections.
The