been startlingly impressed on him in
Carlyle's writings; and in the parliamentary talk of that day he had
come to have as little faith for the putting down of any serious evil,
as in a then notorious city Alderman's gabble for the putting down of
suicide. The latter had stirred his indignation to its depths just
before he came to Italy, and his increased opportunities of solitary
reflection since had strengthened and extended it. When he came
therefore to think of his new story for Christmas time, he resolved to
make it a plea for the poor. He did not want it to resemble his _Carol_,
but the same kind of moral was in his mind. He was to try and convert
Society, as he had converted Scrooge, by showing that its happiness
rested on the same foundations as those of the individual, which are
mercy and charity not less than justice. Whether right or wrong in these
assumptions, need not be questioned here, where facts are merely stated
to render intelligible what will follow; he had not made politics at any
time a study, and they were always an instinct with him rather than a
science; but the instinct was wholesome and sound, and to set class
against class never ceased to be as odious to him as he thought it
righteous at all times to help each to a kindlier knowledge of the
other. And so, here in Italy, amid the grand surroundings of this
Palazzo Peschiere, the hero of his imagination was to be a sorry old
drudge of a London ticket-porter, who in his anxiety not to distrust or
think hardly of the rich, has fallen into the opposite extreme of
distrusting the poor. From such distrust it is the object of the story
to reclaim him; and, to the writer of it, the tale became itself of less
moment than what he thus intended it to enforce. Far beyond mere vanity
in authorship went the passionate zeal with which he began, and the
exultation with which he finished, this task. When we met at its close,
he was fresh from Venice, which had impressed him as "the wonder" and
"the new sensation" of the world: but well do I remember how high above
it all arose the hope that filled his mind. "Ah!" he said to me, "when I
saw those places, how I thought that to leave one's hand upon the time,
lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling
people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the
dust of all the Doges in their graves, and stand upon a giant's
staircase that Sampson couldn't overthrow!" In varyi