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How far it is wise, or how far it is expedient, for art to forsake the educated world, and betake itself in search of fresh nature and unso

phisticated character to the lowest levels of society, and there to the farthest fringe which divides social guiltlessness (for we cannot say innocence) from crime, is, to our own thinking, a very doubtful question. Nature is no more unsophisticated down below there than it is upon the haughtiest levels. We do not perceive the conventionalities only because they are of a kind unknown tous-or, when we do perceive them, their simple absurdity strikes us so, that in the amusement with which we regard them, we forget to think that the conventionalities which are real and cruel restraints to ourselves, would look quite as absurd to any body as superior to us in training and education, as we are to the costermongers and vagrants of London. The author of No Church' has, with apparently a serious inspiration more consistent than that of most of the writers who eluci date the noisy utterances of Whitechapel and the Borough, and convey the story of these heathen places to the distant ear, taken his stand in that confused and obscure world. He takes us there, not to introduce us to quaint wits or darkling villains, but to show us how the course of life flows on-how goodness may exist without religion, but how religion alone can confirm and perfect goodness. His hero, Owen, is a bright, fearless, quick-witted, famishing London lad, desolate and self-sustaining, deserted by a worthless mother, and charmed by the motherly looks and words of a poor costermonger's wife to the paths of honesty and virtue. This poor woman has been, as poor women will, increasing the population of Whitechapel, when the wistful boy, alarmed for the safety of his patroness, appears, in the following effective and simple sketch, watching the humble, anxious

house :

"All was quiet at Tarby's shed, where the gas burned low, and where Tarby walked about on tiptoe enjoying his after-supper pipe, and looking as sober pockets, and his cap tilted on his foreas a judge. Tarby had his hands in his head, and was promenading thoughtfully to and fro, holding a committee of ways and means with himself, and mapping out the proceeds of last week, and calculating for the next, and disturbed in cast that troubled him, and with which the operation by thoughts of a deeper we shall presently trouble the reader.... Tarby, deep in committee, and addressing the chair at the present moment on the probability of a rise in turnips, was unconscious of a watcher who stood in the opposite doorway, and took stock of whose clothes were a trifle more worn his proceedings. A youthful watcher, and dilapidated than when the reader made his acquaintance, and whose face, if he had stopped underneath the gaslamp yonder, would have been found than when attention was first drawn to more thin and pinched and haggard it on the great London road some three months since. The eyes were very anxiously directed towards the shop at the corner, and the heart under the rags beat with an uncertainty and a sickening sense of fear very new to it. For the watcher had been at that post night after Mrs Chickney had presented itself, and night for above a week, and no sign of he had wished to see and speak to her. But Tarby had been only there of an evening, and he had nothing to say to Tarby just then in which Tarby could take an interest or assist him; it was Tarby's wife he wanted, and she never blind before the back-parlour glass-door, appeared; and he knew, by the drawn that she was ill inside there, and that it was better, however time pressed, not to

trouble her.

"Owen was watching him with great intentness, when the parlour door opened, and the woman whom he had noticed hastily forth, and flung up both arms serving occasionally in the shop came in rather a stagey manner. Owen saw Tarby make two strides towards the street, then stop at the woman's voice, hesitate, and, turning back, go into the parlour. we Owen left his hiding-place, and ran to the two steps into the shop in his excitethe opposite side of the way, and up ment, then down again as the parlour door opened, and Tarby re-emerged. He was in his old hiding-place when Tarby went to the shop-board, and proceeded to lug forth a rickety shutter

that had not seen paint or varnish, or known a scrubbing-brush, since its first coat in ages remote. Owen looked perplexed, and turned a shade more pale. If he had been ever taught a prayer, it might have escaped his lips then, hard and inured to the world as he was. For she had been his one friend-the only one whom he had known. She-but perhaps Tarby was only going to shut up early.... only going to shut up, to be sure. Why, here comes another

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"I want to see Tarby.'
"Can't I serve you?'

"No!' was the quick response. Tarby reappeared in the shop after this abrupt reply, and Owen and he looked each other in the face.

"What is that you?' said Tarby.

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'Yes, it's me;' and there they stood looking at each other, till Owen broke silence. I see the shutters are upI'm sorry.'

"Tarby did not answer, but surveyed him with a little more surprise. "She-she,' with a gulp, gave me the first good word, and that's more nor my own mother ever did. She promised to tell me what was wrong if I ever thought I didn't know it from the right; and now she's dead, Tarby.'

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Not the old woman-not Polly, boy. It aren't so bad as that.'"

This little picture is touched with great delicacy and truth in its perfect homeliness, no way etherealised out of the poor, very poor, greengrocer's shop, which is a paradisaical home to the contemplation of the houseless vagrant outside, yet full of a real sentiment and wistful anxiety. This is the beginning of the poor boy's good fortune. The mother, just bereaved of her baby, uses the power of her weakness and grief to melt her husband's heart to the houseless lad, who is taken into their home and hearts, and becomes the stay of the family when

Tarby himself, who has three periodical saturnalia every year, knocks down a policeman at last too vigorously, kills the man, and is transported in consequence. The story is not successfully constructed, and has many weak points. Owen, out of the greengrocer's shop, has to be made a gentleman and rich man, which is of course a rather troublesome operation; and the author's ingenuity is considerably tried by the effort of changing his ground with his whole group to a level of gentility, and indeed wealth. He manages the leap, it is true, but it is forced, and not over-successful; and Owen, the costermonger's boy, is a much more natural and agreeable character than the Owen who, in six years, makes money enough to come back from Australia and become master, along with his partners, of a large London foundry. The mere fact of this necessity for raising the hero's social position is a serious objection against the choice of a poor boy for this office. Poor boys rarely become comfortable gentlemen, and it is a petty result enough of the research which goes down, enlightened and candid, to show us what noble lives and pure hearts are among the poorest poor, when the same hand which throws that light upon the masses makes haste to detach its special protégé from among them, and elevate him to a higher standing, that his virtues may have breathing room. Owen, unlike Pip, works his way up steadily, with some show of probability; but, like Pip, takes to being a gentleman with a facility and readiness not always characteristic of blacksmith or costermonger boys. When he comes to man's estate, his pride and his affections are alike wounded, and he resolves upon leaving England. Just at the same critical moment, his wretched mother turns up suddenly in the lowest depth of drunkenness and wretchedness, and, touched by unexpected kindness, resolves to reform, and consents

to go abroad with him. All goes pretty well until the last evening, when the young man, proud, wounded, and embittered, as it is the special privilege of a plebeian hero to be, comes home to find that the wretched creature has been trifling with temptation, warns her sternly that she must give up either her favourite vice or him, and leaves her, believing her penitent. The description that follows strikes us as being singularly powerful :

"She was thinking of the morrow, too, in that darkened room. She had

not thought of a light until she had somewhat noisily closed the door behind her, and bumped herself on the floor, in a position similar to that which she had adopted in the drawing-room, after the last reproaches of her son. He would be quiet now, and not come down to worry her till the morning till the morning! She shuddered as she thought of it. It was an awful prospect that morning, when he would enter with his death's face, and those dark eyes which would go clean through her, and make her feel ready to sink through the floor. would talk of her moral weakness and the last chance, and she would be sober then, and every word would stab like a dagger, and yet he would go on stabbing unmercifully. And, after all, for what? To make her live better, show a clean dress and face to the society she hated; render her a servant and a slave; take her to foreign parts, which she did not believe for a moment would agree with her. What did it all amount to?-misery!

He

She was to be sober, and think eternally of those many sins which had multiplied upon her since her first step from right, and thinking of them was horror! She had been all her life trying to forget them in drink, and now he took the drink away because it was more respectable. She didn't care to live respectable just to please him, who, now he was a fine gentleman, wanted a decent mother. He was only thinking of himself; he didn't care much about that past life he was so anxious she should escape from. And it wasn't such a miserable life, come to think of it. There was no one but her

self to please, and it was hard to please

two. She had found that out soon enough. She couldn't please two all her life, and the time would come when he would throw her off in her weakness, and then she should be in a foreign place, where there were no old pals to look up,

no old haunts to seek refuge in. No, it hadn't been so miserable a life; lots of fun and gin! A rare exciting life, with little to do but hang about 'the publics,' and spend the money one had begged, borrowed, or stolen. He talk of casting her back to the streets! Why, the streets were her natural element, and she could exist there. She was a woman of the streets, and their darkness was congenial. She knew every turn of them, half the faces in them, and to think of it all made She had tried a change, and it had not agreed with her; let her be off. When the worst came to the worst-somehow that

her yearn as for home.

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unfriendly meeting did occur with most of her pals at the last she could drown herself. There might be a year, two, a dozen, between this time and that, and between whiles she should be having her own way. Let her be off, then, silently and cunningly, with her boots in her hand, lest the stairs should creak in the descent; and her breath bated for fear the quick ears of that proud young upstart like his mother. should hear her; he was awfully sharp,

"She had unlaced her boots as thought suggested her plan of action: she had

risen with them in her hands. An awful

figure looming amidst the darkness-the angels who had had hope of her might have wept to see her! The old look, the back by the irresistible attraction which old evil thoughts-the old figure borne sweeps back to the sea so many like unte her. For the one who clings to the rock, and holds fast in the storm, how many go down! She stepped into the streets, and left the door ajar behind her. It was raining heavily then, and pulled the bonnet over her eyes, and in she huddled her shawl round her, and

an instant it was the same world-worn desolate figure we have seen on Markshire Downs, met in Hannah Street, when Tarby's wife died.

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houses went the woman to her dark Plodding on in the shadow of the estate, back of her own free-will to the sin-haunted life, from which one upward spring had been fruitlessly made. In the rain and the wind, with her head bent down, and the refractory grey hair already making its escape after the old fashion, she emerged into the Kennington Road, and plunged into the network of courts and alleys that spring thencedens of poverty, and sin, and ignorance, and all uncleanness, which there is no sweeping away."

We cannot call to our recollection any similar sketch so little exagger

ated, yet so effective, in recent fiction. It is as sad as it is true, yet refrains from all unnecessary horrors. A little more detail might have made the picture disgusting. As it is, it is almost solemn in its brooding silence, yet restless activity of thought, and in the stealthy resolution and silent guilty joy of the escape. We have had many pictures of reformed lives, but few of the terrible satisfaction with which such a poor sinner escapes out of the restraints of virtue, and has "her will" again.

Mr Dickens is more or less master in art-not to say of an infinite height of superiority in the gifts of nature-to both the writers whose works we have referred to, and to many others of as wide a diversity of gifts. It was he who brought us first to the crowded London lanes to find wit, and worth, and quaint generosity and virtue, among the despised multitude; and it is he who now bends his powers to the popularising among us of that instrument of literary excitement, the weekly Story-teller. Whether he or anybody else will be able to keep that restless agency going with

out descending to the expedients of the feuilletonists, remains yet to be proved. Whether his own fantastic oddities and tamed criminals will do it; or whether, in inferior hands to those which have wielded that equivocal weapon, diablerie can do it, without sinking into insanity, we will not venture to prophesy. We can afford to be grateful, for once in a way, to any form of publication which has introduced into literature the example of skilful workmanship and the delicate and startling thrills of sensation conveyed by the 'Woman in White;' but the Master of the School has not yet condescended to rouse himself for the illustration of his experiment. To combine the higher requirements of art with the lower ones of a popular weekly periodical, and produce something which will be equally perfect in snatches and as a book, is an operation too difficult and delicate for even genius to accomplish, without a bold adaptation of the cunning of the mechanist and closest elaboration of workmanship. How far the result might be worth the labour, we will not attempt to decide.

CAXTONIANA:

A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.

By the Author of 'The Caxton Family.'

PART IV.

NO. VI. ON THE MANAGEMENT OF MONEY.

(Addressed chiefly to the Young.)

In a work of fiction I once wrote this sentence, which perhaps may be found, if considered, suggestive of some practical truths,-" Money is character."

In the humbler grades of life, certainly character is money. The man who gives me his labour in return for the wages which the labour is worth, pledges to me something more than his labour-he pledges to me certain qualities of his moral being such as honesty, sobriety, and diligence. If, in these respects, he maintain his character, he will have my money as long as I want his labour; and, when I want his labour no longer, his character is money's worth to him from somebody else. If, in addition to the moral qualities I have named, he establish a character for other attributes which have their own price in the money market-if he exhibit a superior intelligence, skill, energy, zeal-his labour rises in value. Thus, in the humblest class of life, character is money;-and according as the man earns or spends the money, money in turn becomes character.

As money is the most evident power in the world's uses, so the use that he makes of money is often all that the world knows about a man. Is our money gained justly and spent prudently? our character establishes a claim on respect. Is it gained nobly and spent beneficently? our character commands more than respect-it wins a place in that higher sphere of opinion which comprises admiration, gratitude, love.

VOL. XCI.-NO. DLIX.

Is

money, inherited without merit of ours, lavished recklessly away? our character disperses itself with the spray of the golden shower,—it is not the money alone of which we are spendthrifts. Is money, meanly acquired, selfishly hoarded? it is not the money alone of which we are misers; we are starving our own human hearts-depriving them of their natural aliment in the approval and affection of others. We invest the money which we fancy so safe out at compound interest, in the very worst possession a man can purchase-viz., an odious reputation. In fact, the more we look round, the more we shall come to acknowledge that there is no test of a man's character more generally adopted than the way in which his money is managed. Money is a terrible blab; she will betray the secrets of her owner whatever he do to gag her. His virtues will creep out in her whisper-his vices she will cry aloud at the top of her tongue.

But the management of money is an art? True, but that which we call an art means an improvement, and not a deterioration, of a something existent already in nature; and the artist can only succeed in improving his art in proportion as he improves himself in the qualities which the art demands in the artist. Now, the management of money is, in much, the management of self. If heaven allotted to each man seven guardian angels, five of them, at least, would be found night and day hovering over his pockets.

On the first rule of the art of 2 R

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