t in such a case as Madame Defarge's death. Where the accident
is inseparable from the passion and action of the character; where it is
strictly consistent with the entire design, and arises out of some
culminating proceeding on the part of the individual which the whole
story has led up to; it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of
divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another
question) to bring about such a catastrophe, I have the positive
intention of making that half-comic intervention a part of the desperate
woman's failure; and of opposing that mean death, instead of a desperate
one in the streets which she wouldn't have minded, to the dignity of
Carton's. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in
the fitness of things."

These are interesting intimations of the care with which Dickens worked;
and there is no instance in his novels, excepting this, of a deliberate
and planned departure from the method of treatment which had been
pre-eminently the source of his popularity as a novelist. To rely less
upon character than upon incident, and to resolve that his actors should
be expressed by the story more than they should express themselves by
dialogue, was for him a hazardous, and can hardly be called an entirely
successful, experiment. With singular dramatic vivacity, much
constructive art, and with descriptive passages of a high order
everywhere (the dawn of the terrible outbreak in the journey of the
marquis from Paris to his country seat, and the London crowd at the
funeral of the spy, may be instanced for their power), there was
probably never a book by a great humourist, and an artist so prolific in
the conception of character, with so little humour and so few
rememberable figures. Its merits lie elsewhere. Though there are
excellent traits and touches all through the revolutionary scenes, the
only full-length that stands out prominently is the picture of the
wasted life saved at last by heroic sacrifice. Dickens speaks of his
design to make impressive the dignity of Carton's death, and in this he
succeeded perhaps even beyond his expectation. Carton suffers himself to
be mistaken for another, and gives his life that the girl he loves may
be happy with that other; the secret being known only to a poor little
girl in the tumbril that takes them to the scaffold, who at the moment
has discovered it, and whom it strengthens also to die. The incident is
beautifully