hardly overpraise the workmanship. No story in the first person was ever better told.
Of the Tale of Two Cities (1859) it is impossible to speak so favourably. Like Barnaby Rudge, a historical novel, it is better constructed than that early book, but by no means so alive. In his two novels dealing with a past time, Dickens attacks the two things he most hated in the present; religious fanaticism and social tyranny. Barnaby is in all senses a characteristic book. The Tale of Two Cities can hardly be called so in anything but its theme. The novelist here laid a restraint upon himself; he aimed deliberately at writing a story for the story's sake; the one thing he had never yet been able to do. Among other presumed superfluities, humour is dismissed. To some readers the result appears admirable; for my part, I feel the restraint throughout, miss the best of my author, and, whilst admitting that he has produced something like a true tragedy, reflect that many another man could have handled the theme as well, if not better. It leaves no strong impression on my mind; even the figure of Carton soon grows dim against a dimmer background.
In the autumn of 1867, Dickens left England on his second voyage across the Atlantic, to give that long series of public readings
