to depict as the most detestable of human beings. To give still greater zest to this strange compound, another ingredient has been thrown in. Born in an age when religion appears as 'life in earnest,'-when its influence cannot be gainsaid, and its fruits cannot be hid,-Mr. Dickens is yet a professed worshipper of nature. And, as the result of this anachronism, many of the warmest admirers of his genius (and we profess ourselves among the number) cannot fail to regret that, while he has. invested his anything-but-devotional characters with all that is pure, and lovely, and of good report, he has uniformly exhibited his would-be religious ones with every quality that can excite odium and contempt. Nor is this all. We fear we must add, that to religion he has transferred all the grossnesses of vice; and that, borrowing without acknowledgment from the wardrobe. of religion, he has clad nature in all the graces of virtue. His heroes and heroines are held up as spotless and charming without religion; alas! all the more spotless and charming because without it. Now, we are no ascetics, and few things excite our bile more than the fopperies of some pretended religionists. Nothing gives us more pleasure than to see the mask torn off from the unmanly face that would employ the cant of pietism to gloze over selfishness or sensuality; or to look at a good caricature of the unwomanly zeal which would parade a Christianity without charity, or

a charity that begins anywhere but at home. But if we know anything of Christianity, it is the very perfection of charity, and of everything that is pure, and lovely, and blessed. Why, then, present it only in its carica ture? We like to see the bad shilling nailed to the counter; but where is the genuine metal? Surely, Mr. Dickens,' one feels compelled to exclaim, 'you must have been singularly unhappy in the specimens of Christianity you have met with. If one may judge from the figure which it cuts in your pages, you must never have seen it apart from the sulky scowl of the bigot, the odious squint of hypocrisy, or the greasy dawdling simper of half-crazed fanaticism. On no occasion can it have been your lot to see Christian principle and piety in alliance with manly dignity or female loveliness. For certainly, in all the brilliant creations of your genius, religion seldom if ever appears, except in the form of a grim sprite, casting its cold shadow on every scene of innocence and gaiety into which it intrudes.'

"What 'Little Dorrit' may turn out to be it is not for us, who are seated before the curtain, to say; but already has the reader been prepared for a stroke at the inner sanctities of religious life, in the form of an attack on some of the most questionable of its outer demonstrations. A gentleman of the name of Clennam is introduced, overcharged with melancholy, which is traced to

a stern religious training, and which, strangely enough continues to hang about him, even after spending twenty summers in China. This middle-aged gentleman gives a sad account of his parents. 'Staid people, as the phrase is, professors of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next, -nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart everywhere; this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to apply it to such a beginning of life.' This hideous sketch, however, only forms the back-ground to the picture that follows, in which we see the reflection of the past, with its dark shades and slimy reptiles crawling over the imagination of the religion-haunted man:—

"Mr. Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of a year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter it went off into a condition of deadly lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to Church, Come to Church, Come to Church! At the ten minutes it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They won't come, they won't come, they won't come! At the five minutes it abandoned 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 on. 'Heaven forgive me,' said he, and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!"

4 "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