hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood, for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair.

"Thank Heaven,' said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell stopped.

"But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march 'Heaven forgive me,' said he,' and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!'

on.

"And then come 'the dreary Sunday of his childhood,'-'the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood,'—' the interminable Sunday of his nonage,'--and 'the resentful Sunday of a little later, when he sat glowering and glooming through the tardy length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no more knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been bred among idolaters.

There was

a legion of Sundays, all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing before him.' All this might have passed as a satire upon certain Puritanic habits which may have existed in England at some remote period; and the exception made in favour of "the beneficent history of the New Testament,' may be held a sufficient, though certainly a very cheap method for buying off a dark suspicion, which might otherwise militate rather expensively against the reputation of the writer. But Mr Dickens has left us no room to doubt that his object is, under cover of reprobating a forced observance of Sunday, which is as ridiculous as it must be rare, to aim at the citadel of the Sabbath itself, and to vindicate a loose un-English observance, or rather non-observance, of that day, in the style in

which it has been advocated by the Holyoakes and other disciples of the naturalist school. The following description identifies him with the party :

"Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world, all taboo with that enlightened strictness that the ugly South Sea gods in the British museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it, or the worst, according to the probabilities."

Nothing is easier, with such a fancy as that of Dickens, than to cull out of an overgrown metropolis materials for the gloomy sketch he has drawn; though, even to the eye of a poet, the spectacle of London's mighty heart quieted for one day from the incessant throbbings of the week, and the hard-toiled artisan permitted to enjoy a day of unbroken rest of body and mind in the bosom of his family and the devotions of the sanctuary, might have suggested a more pleasing, and certainly more rational picture. The scene of repose of which Dickens has given such a doleful view, if transferred to the country, would suggest only images of delight; and why should the overwrought sons of labour in towns be denied the opportunity of visiting such scenes, except on the only day which religion has provided for them? We confess we cannot understand the mawkish sentimentalism which would deny them a single hour during

the week, which is the property of man, and then, with an affectation of great liberality, hand them over a present of the day which is the property of God. But, indeed, the world would rob man even of that day, if it could; and, instead of shut shops and silent streets, we should soon have the unremitting sweat and swelter, roar and revelry, of a Parisian Sunday. We recollect of being struck, on a certain holiday, when the gay crowds, released from their employments, were jostling and jesting along the streets, by seeing a hearse pass mournfully along, with all the dismal pomp and paraphernalia which seems such a mockery of woe. And as it moved onwards, shaking its plumed head with ominous meaning at the happy faces turned up to it, how true it is, we thought, that death keeps no holiday. And were it not for Christianity, Mammon would keep no holiday. His grating wheels would roll on with ruthless intermission; and to every cry from its agonized slaves, the answer would be that of the Egyptian monarch, 'Ye are idle, ye are idle. therefore ye say, Let us go and do sacrifice. Go now, therefore, and work.'

Every one has his own taste; but to ours, we confess, melancholy as is Mr. Dickens's account of stern sabbatarianism, there is something still more gloomy in the thought of genius cringing at the feet of vulgar vice, and pandering to the low tastes and worse passions of a London mob. It reminds one of the days of Moloch, and irresistibly suggests the image of smiling childhood, garlanded with flowers, and sacrificed, amidst music

and frankincense, to some bloodthirsty deity. And perhaps the most dangerous and seductive form which irreligion assumes in the present day, is that which affects the language of natural religion, rears crystal palaces in which to offer the fruits of the ground as sacrifices, appropriates the Sabbath as the best and the only day for this species of Cain-worship, and engages as its priests and hierophants our men of science and the most popular writers of the day. It may be vain to reason with such men, so long as their minds remain so obtuse to the paramount claims of religion, and so long as they maintain the low-minded faith, that man's enjoyments and aspirations are limited to the present life. It may be vain to remind them, that ere the common people can appreciate natural beauty, they must be trained by previous moral and mental culture; else Nature, viewed in her lovliest forms and her loftiest moods, will fail to quench a single lust, or inspire a single generous emotion. It may be equally vain to impress upon them the weighty words of Pope, that 'He who considers this earthly spot as the only theatre of his existence and its grave, instead of the first stage in progressive being, can never view nature with a cheerful, or man with a benevolent eye.' But there is another view of the matter to which, as more immediately touching themselves, they may be presumed more accessible. The most earthly-minded secularist is not willing to forego, in behalf of his writings, the mmortality which he disclaims for himself. And yet,

nothing is more certain than that literary productions that have been prostituted to the service of vice and irreligion, are incapable of long life. They want the principle of vitality; their wages is death. Dryden, with all his genius, and Butler, with all his wit, have not been able to preserve, the one his licentious plays, or the other his once famous satire, from a neglect bordering on oblivion. The filth and garbage of our literature, which pleased for a time the lovers of such stuff, have sunk to the bottom, leaving only what was pure and fresh to flow down the stream of time into immortality. Bad as mankind may be, they have no idea of erecting monuments to the memory of people whose sole distinction was their agility in pulling down the fences and trampling on the sanctities of moral obligation. Even though they may be amused with such antics, they have no respect for the performer, whom they may inwardly despise, as the profligate shuns by day the scene of his nightly debauch.

as

Entertaining, as we do, a real liking to the man, well as admiration of the writer, fain would we whisper in the ear of Mr. Dickens, that his is a genius too genial, as well as lofty, to become the common drudge of metropolitan rascality, or the common drain for carrying off and diffusing throughout the country the fetid. streams which can only raise a crop of rank and unwholesome vegetation; that we dread the effect of such writing as he has chosen to indulge in on young and ardent minds; and that his own reputation depends