lings
would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the
dreariness of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral
felicity. Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly
trained Londoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which he has
been accustomed, but asks for _that_ in continually more ardent or more
virulent concentration; and the ultimate power of fiction to entertain
him is by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dullness
the horrors, of Death. In the single novel of "Bleak House" there are
nine deaths (or left for death's, in the drop scene) carefully wrought
out or led up to, either by way of pleasing surprise, as the baby's at
the brick-maker's, or finished in their threatenings and sufferings,
with as much enjoyment as can be contrived in the anticipation, and as
much pathology as can be concentrated in the description. Under the
following varieties of method:--

One by assassination Mr. Tulkinghorn.
One by starvation, with phthisis Joe.
One by chagrin Richard.
One by spontaneous combustion Mr. Krook.
One by sorrow Lady Dedlock's lover.
One by remorse Lady Dedlock.
One by insanity Miss Flite.
One by paralysis Sir Leicester.

Besides the baby, by fever, and a lively young Frenchwoman left to be
hanged.

And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story,
but merely as the further enlivenment of a narrative intended to be
amusing; and as a properly representative average of the statistics of
civilian mortality in the center of London.

9. Observe further, and chiefly. It is not the mere number of deaths
(which, if we count the odd troopers in the last scene, is exceeded in
"Old Mortality," and reached, within one or two, both in "Waverley" and
"Guy Mannering") that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is
the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least
in the world's estimate, respectable persons; and that they are all
grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate
the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our
population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison.
Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can be usually supposed as
faultless in the eye of Heaven as a dove or a woodcock; bu