cions by going, disguised in her maid's clothes, to the poor
graveyard where her former lover lies buried. The lawyer worms the
whole story out, and, just as he is going to reveal it, is murdered by
the French maid aforesaid. But the murder comes too late to save my
lady, nay, adds to her difficulties. She flies, in anticipation of the
disclosure of her secret, and is found dead at the graveyard gate. To
such end has the sin of her youth led her. So once again has Dickens
dwelt, not on the passionate side of wrongful love, but on its sorrow.
Now take the other thread--the Chancery suit--"Jarndyce _versus_
Jarndyce," a suit held in awful reverence by the profession as a
"monument of Chancery practice"--a suit seemingly interminable, till,
after long, long years of wrangling and litigation, the fortuitous
discovery of a will settles it all, with the result that the whole
estate has been swallowed up in the costs. And how about the
litigants? How about poor Richard Carstone and his wife, whom we see,
in the opening of the story, in all the heyday and happiness of their
youth, strolling down to the court--they are its wards,--and wondering
sadly over the "headache and heartache" of it all, and then saying,
gleefully, "at all events Chancery will work none of its bad influence
on _us_"? "None of its bad influence on _us_!" poor lad, whose life is
wasted and character impaired in following the mirage of the suit, and
who is killed by the mockery of its end. Thus do the two intertwined
stories run; but apart from these, though all in place and keeping,
and helping on the general development, there is a whole profusion of
noticeable characters. In enumerating them, however baldly, one
scarcely knows where to begin. The lawyer group--clerks and all--is
excellent. Dickens' early experiences stood him in good stead here.
Excellent too are those studies in the ways of impecuniosity and
practical shiftlessness, Harold Skimpole, the airy, irresponsible,
light-hearted epicurean, with his pretty tastes and dilettante
accomplishments, and Mrs. Jellyby, the philanthropist, whose eyes "see
nothing nearer" than Borrioboola-Gha, on the banks of the far Niger,
and never dwell to any purpose on the utter discomfort of the home of
her husband and children. Characters of this kind no one ever
delineated better than Dickens. That Leigh Hunt, the poet and
essayist, who had sat for the portrait of Skimpole, was not altogether
flattered by the liken