rd_--utterly the _Fair Maid of
Perth_: and culminating in _Bizarro_, L. x. 149. It suggested all the
deaths by falling, or sinking, as in delirious sleep--Kennedy, Eveline
Neville (nearly repeated in Clara Mowbray), Amy Robsart, the Master of
Ravenswood in the quicksand, Morris, and Corporal Grace-be-here--compare
the dream of Gride, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, and Dickens's own last
words, _on the ground_, (so also, in my own inflammation of the brain,
two years ago, I dreamed that I fell through the earth and came out on
the other side). In its grotesque and distorting power, it produced all
the figures of the Lay Goblin, Pacolet, Flibbertigibbet, Cockledemoy,
Geoffrey Hudson, Fenella, and Nectabanus; in Dickens it in like manner
gives Quilp, Krook, Smike, Smallweed, Miss Mowcher, and the dwarfs and
wax-work of Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in _Barnaby Rudge_,
where, with a _corps de drame_ composed of one idiot, two madmen, a
gentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a
blackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll in
ribands--carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the
hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the
gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the
shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content without
shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to the doll in a
wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also married in _two_
wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is the very sign
manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it, with a love
of thorniness--(in their mystic root, the truncation of the limbless
serpent and the spines of the dragon's wing. Compare _Modern Painters_,
vol. iv., 'Chapter on the Mountain Gloom,' s. 19); and in _all_ forms of
it, with petrifaction or loss of power by cold in the blood, whence the
last Darwinian process of the witches' charm--'cool it with a baboon's
_blood_, _then_ the charm is firm and good.' The two frescoes in the
colossal handbills which have lately decorated the streets of London
(the baboon with the mirror, and the Maskelyne and Cooke decapitation)
are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque under this influence;
and it is well worth while to get the number for the week ending April
3, 1880, of _Young Folks_--'A magazine of instructive and entertaining
literature for boys and girls of all ages,' containing 'A Se