hung over the bridge in an inexplicable
manner. No words can describe the scene.[273] I am away to Gads." Though
with characteristic energy he resisted the effects upon himself of that
terrible ninth of June, they were for some time evident; and, up to the
day of his death on its fatal fifth anniversary, were perhaps never
wholly absent. But very few complaints fell from him. "I am curiously
weak--weak as if I were recovering from a long illness." "I begin to
feel it more in my head. I sleep well and eat well; but I write half a
dozen notes, and turn faint and sick." "I am getting right, though still
low in pulse and very nervous. Driving into Rochester yesterday I felt
more shaken than I have since the accident." "I cannot bear railway
travelling yet. A perfect conviction, against the senses, that the
carriage is down on one side (and generally that is the left, and _not_
the side on which the carriage in the accident really went over), comes
upon me with anything like speed, and is inexpressibly distressing."
These are passages from his letters up to the close of June. Upon his
book the immediate result was that another lost number was added to the
losses of the preceding months, and "alas!" he wrote at the opening of
July, "for the two numbers you write of! There is only one in existence.
I have but just begun the other." "Fancy!" he added next day, "fancy my
having under-written number sixteen by two and a half pages--a thing I
have not done since _Pickwick_!" He did it once with _Dombey_, and was
to do it yet again.

The book thus begun and continued under adverse influences, though with
fancy in it, descriptive power, and characters well designed, will never
rank with his higher efforts. It has some pictures of a rare veracity of
soul amid the lowest forms of social degradation, placed beside others
of sheer falsehood and pretence amid unimpeachable social correctness,
which lifted the writer to his old place; but the judgment of it on the
whole must be, that it wants freshness and natural development. This
indeed will be most freely admitted by those who feel most strongly that
all the old cunning of the master hand is yet in the wayward loving
Bella Wilfer, in the vulgar canting Podsnap, and in the dolls'
dressmaker Jenny Wren, whose keen little quaint weird ways, and
precocious wit sharpened by trouble, are fitted into a character as
original and delightfully conceived as it is vividly carried through to
the la