told; and it is at least only fair to set against verdicts
not very favourable as to this effort of his invention, what was said of
the particular character and scene, and of the book generally, by an
American critic whose literary studies had most familiarized him with
the rarest forms of imaginative writing.[268] "Its pourtrayal of the
noble-natured castaway makes it almost a peerless book in modern
literature, and gives it a place among the highest examples of literary
art. . . . The conception of this character shows in its author an ideal of
magnanimity and of charity unsurpassed. There is not a grander, lovelier
figure than the self-wrecked, self-devoted Sydney Carton, in literature
or history; and the story itself is so noble in its spirit, so grand and
graphic in its style, and filled with a pathos so profound and simple,
that it deserves and will surely take a place among the great serious
works of imagination." I should myself prefer to say that its
distinctive merit is less in any of its conceptions of character, even
Carton's, than as a specimen of Dickens's power in imaginative
story-telling. There is no piece of fiction known to me, in which the
domestic life of a few simple private people is in such a manner knitted
and interwoven with the outbreak of a terrible public event, that the
one seems but part of the other. When made conscious of the first sultry
drops of a thunderstorm that fall upon a little group sitting in an
obscure English lodging, we are witness to the actual beginning of a
tempest which is preparing to sweep away everything in France. And, to
the end, the book in this respect is really remarkable.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

The _Tale of Two Cities_ was published in 1859; the series of papers
collected as the _Uncommercial Traveller_ were occupying Dickens in
1860; and it was while engaged in these, and throwing off in the course
of them capital "samples" of fun and enjoyment, he thus replied to a
suggestion that he should let himself loose upon some single humorous
conception, in the vein of his youthful achievements in that way. "For a
little piece I have been writing--or am writing; for I hope to finish it
to-day--such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me,
that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper,
and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get
it printed. But it so opens out before _me_ that I can see the whole of