wife of the custodian of the college where the chemist is professor,
in whom are all the unselfish virtues that can beautify and endear the
humblest condition, is the instrument of the change. Such sorrow as she
had suffered had made her only zealous to relieve others' sufferings:
and the discontented wise man learns from her example that the world is,
after all, a much happier compromise than it seems to be, and life
easier than wisdom is apt to think it; that grief gives joy its relish,
purifying what it touches truly; and that "sweet are the uses of
adversity" when its clouds are not the shadow of dishonour. All this
can be shown but lightly within such space, it is true; and in the
machinery a good deal has to be taken for granted. But Dickens was quite
justified in turning aside from objections of that kind. "You must
suppose," he wrote to me (21st of November), "that the Ghost's saving
clause gives him those glimpses without which it would be impossible to
carry out the idea. Of course my point is that bad and good are
inextricably linked in remembrance, and that you could not choose the
enjoyment of recollecting only the good. To have all the best of it you
must remember the worst also. My intention in the other point you
mention is, that he should not know himself how he communicates the
gift, whether by look or touch; and that it should diffuse itself in its
own way in each case. I can make this clearer by a very few lines in the
second part. It is not only necessary to be so, for the variety of the
story, but I think it makes the thing wilder and stranger." Critical
niceties are indeed out of place, where wildness and strangeness in the
means matter less than that there should be clearness in the drift and
intention. Dickens leaves no doubt as to this. He thoroughly makes out
his fancy, that no man should so far question the mysterious
dispensations of evil in this world as to desire to lose the
recollection of such injustice or misery as he may suppose it to have
done to himself. There may have been sorrow, but there was the kindness
that assuaged it; there may have been wrong, but there was the charity
that forgave it; and with both are connected inseparably so many
thoughts that soften and exalt whatever else is in the sense of memory,
that what is good and pleasurable in life would cease to continue so if
these were forgotten. The old proverb does not tell you to forget that
you may forgive, but to forgive t