years that man ever lived—comes Barnaby Rudge, which is in part a romance of private life, in part a historical novel. The two parts are not well knit together; the interest with which we begin is lost in far wider interests before we end; nevertheless Barnaby is free from Dickens's worst vices of construction. Granting the imperfection of the scheme, it is closely wrought and its details not ill-contrived. One defect forced upon our attention is characteristic of Dickens: his inability to make skilful revelation of circumstances which, for the purpose of the story, he has kept long concealed. This skill never came to him; with apology for so disrespectful a word, he must be held to have bungled all his effects of this kind, and there can be no doubt that the revealing of the mystery of Edwin Drood would have betrayed the old inability. Permit Dickens to show us the life he knew in its simple everyday course and he is unsurpassed by any master of fiction; demand from him a contrived story and he yields at once to the very rank and file of novelists.
A peculiarity of this book is the frequent opening of a chapter with several lines of old-fashioned moralizing, generally on the moral compensations of life. Later, Dickens found a happy substitute for this kind of thing in his
