he
separate incidents have been planned with a more studied consideration
of the bearing they are severally to have on the general result. Nothing
is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the
various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre, and to the
larger interest all the rest is irresistibly drawn. The heart of the
story is a Chancery suit. On this the plot hinges, and on incidents
connected with it, trivial or important, the passion and suffering turn
exclusively. Chance words, or the deeds of chance people, to appearance
irrelevant, are found everywhere influencing the course taken by a train
of incidents of which the issue is life or death, happiness or misery,
to men and women perfectly unknown to them, and to whom they are
unknown. Attorneys of all possible grades, law clerks of every
conceivable kind, the copyist, the law stationer, the usurer, all sorts
of money lenders, suitors of every description, haunters of the Chancery
court and their victims, are for ever moving round about the lives of
the chief persons in the tale, and drawing them on insensibly, but very
certainly, to the issues that await them. Even the fits of the little
law-stationer's servant help directly in the chain of small things that
lead indirectly to Lady Dedlock's death. One strong chain of interest
holds together Chesney Wold and its inmates, Bleak House and the
Jarndyce group, Chancery with its sorry and sordid neighbourhood. The
characters multiply as the tale advances, but in each the drift is the
same. "There's no great odds betwixt my noble and learned brother and
myself," says the grotesque proprietor of the rag and bottle shop under
the wall of Lincoln's-inn, "they call me Lord Chancellor and my shop
Chancery, and we both of us grub on in a muddle." _Edax rerum_ the motto
of both, but with a difference. Out of the lumber of the shop emerge
slowly some fragments of evidence by which the chief actors in the story
are sensibly affected, and to which Chancery itself might have succumbed
if its devouring capacities had been less complete. But by the time
there is found among the lumber the will which puts all to rights in the
Jarndyce suit, it is found to be too late to put anything to rights. The
costs have swallowed up the estate, and there is an end of the matter.

What in one sense is a merit however may in others be a defect, and this
book has suffered by the very completeness with which its Chancery