thin legitimate limits was an
art he laboriously studied; and, in whatever proportions of failure or
success, during the vicissitudes of both that attended his later years,
he continued to endeavour to practise it. In regard to mere description,
it is true, he let himself loose more frequently, and would sometimes
defend it even on the ground of art; nor would it be fair to omit his
reply, on one occasion, to some such remonstrance as M. Taine has
embodied in his adverse criticism, against the too great imaginative
wealth thrown by him into mere narrative.[266] "It does not seem to me
to be enough to say of any description that it is the exact truth. The
exact truth must be there; but the merit or art in the narrator, is the
manner of stating the truth. As to which thing in literature, it always
seems to me that there is a world to be done. And in these times, when
the tendency is to be frightfully literal and catalogue-like--to make
the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable
creature can do in that way--I have an idea (really founded on the love
of what I profess), that the very holding of popular literature through
a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fanciful treatment."

THE TALE OF TWO CITIES.

Dickens's next story to _Little Dorrit_ was the _Tale of Two Cities_, of
which the first notion occurred to him while acting with his friends and
his children in the summer of 1857 in Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama of _The
Frozen Deep_. But it was only a vague fancy, and the sadness and trouble
of the winter of that year were not favourable to it. Towards the close
(27th) of January 1858, talking of improvements at Gadshill in which he
took little interest, it was again in his thoughts. "Growing
inclinations of a fitful and undefined sort are upon me sometimes to
fall to work on a new book. Then I think I had better not worry my
worried mind yet awhile. Then I think it would be of no use if I did,
for I couldn't settle to one occupation.--And that's all!" "If I can
discipline my thoughts," he wrote three days later, "into the channel of
a story, I have made up my mind to get to work on one: always supposing
that I find myself, on the trial, able to do well. Nothing whatever will
do me the least 'good' in the way of shaking the one strong possession
of change impending over us that every day makes stronger; but if I
could work on with some approach to steadiness, through the summer, the
anxiou