ise
below,--the villainous confidence of habit never extinguishing in him
the anxious watchings and listenings of crime,--as when we see him at
the last in the condemned cell, like a poisoned human rat in a hole.

A word may be added upon the attacks directed against the subject of the
book, to which Dickens made reply in one of his later editions,
declaring his belief that he had tried to do a service to society, and
had certainly done no disservice, in depicting a knot of such associates
in crime in all their deformity and squalid wretchedness, skulking
uneasily through a miserable life to a painful and shameful death. It
is, indeed, never the subject that can be objectionable, if the
treatment is not so, as we may see by much popular writing since, where
subjects unimpeachably high are brought low by degrading sensualism.
When the object of a writer is to exhibit the vulgarity of vice, and not
its pretensions to heroism or cravings for sympathy, he may measure his
subject with the highest. We meet with a succession of swindlers and
thieves in _Gil Blas_; we shake hands with highwaymen and housebreakers
all round in the _Beggars' Opera_; we pack cards with La Ruse or pick
pockets with Jonathan in Fielding's _Mr. Wild the Great_; we follow
cruelty and vice from its least beginning to its grossest ends in the
prints of Hogarth; but our morals stand none the looser for any of them.
As the spirit of the Frenchman was pure enjoyment, the strength of the
Englishmen lay in wisdom and satire. The low was set forth to pull down
the false pretensions of the high. And though for the most part they
differ in manner and design from Dickens in this tale, desiring less to
discover the soul of goodness in things evil than to brand the stamp of
evil on things apt to pass for good, their objects and results are
substantially the same. Familiar with the lowest kind of abasement of
life, the knowledge is used, by both him and them, to teach what
constitutes its essential elevation; and by the very coarseness and
vulgarity of the materials employed we measure the gentlemanliness and
beauty of the work that is done. The quack in morality will always call
such writing immoral, and the impostors will continue to complain of its
treatment of imposture, but for the rest of the world it will still
teach the invaluable lesson of what men ought to be from what they are.
We cannot learn it more than enough. We cannot too often be told that as
the