and deep, upbraiding him for want of faith in their ministry, for permitting himself ever to fancy that they could be at any time harsh, unsympathetic, or unkind.' Then the spirit of the chimes unveils to him the future of the being he loves best, thus revealing allegorically that the hopes, occupations, and memories of evil men may put grossly false constructions on the oracles of the bells; that conscience, fled from the heart of the wicked man to the chimes, and in them becoming a kind of metallic second soul, thence appealed to his nobler nature, just as his evil memories welled forth thence, to menace but also to save him. He learned to regard the bells as always benignant, hopeful, pitying, never cruel, malignant, or inexorable to the race of mortals.

Dickens prepares the reader's mind to form an estimate of his chief characters by bell-soliloquies on their salient points, their past history, their present aims; so that from the mouth of his bells you may gather their ultimate destiny. At the very climax of their chicanery the sound of a bell tolls their doom. The sound of a deep bell came along the wind. One. Lie on, cried the usurer (Ralph Nickleby), with your iron tongue! Ring merrily for births that make expectants writhe, and marriages that are made in hell, and toll ruefully for the dead whose shoes are worn already! Call men to prayers who are godly because not found out, and ring chimes for the coming-in of every year that brings this cursed world nearer to its end. No bell or book for me! Throw me on a dunghill, and let me rot there to infect the air.' Take another instance: Jonas Chuzzlewit, who, after the murder, hears the ringers practising in a neighbouring church, and the clashing of their bells was almost maddening. Curse the clamouring bells, they seemed to know that he was listening at the door, and to proclaim it in a crowd of voices to all the town! Would they never be still? They ceased at last, and then the silence was so new and terrible that it seemed the prelude to some dreadful

noise.'

Again, recall the end of Fagin (in Oliver Twist), as he lies in Newgate under sentence of death: Other watchers were glad to hear the church-bell strike, as telling of life and coming day; to Fagin it brought despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden with one deep hollow sound-Death!'

At the deaths of many of his other vicious characters-Krook, Steerforth, Tulkinghorn-the bells play their dirge. So much for Dickens' death-knells. Next come the bells as monitors; as at the moment when (in Hard Times) Stephen Blackpool, unendurably tortured by the constant drunkenness of his slatternly wife, is about to poison her, the wind brought the sound of the church-bells to the windows.' The sound of a bell discomfits Carker in the height of his villanous triumph, and as he flees from the vengeance of Paul Dombey, the ringing of his lashed horses' bells seems to ask "Whither?"

through the long dark night ever dwelling on that monotonous refrain.' Then again, there is the gruff old bell always peeping down at Scrooge out of the Gothic window in the old church-tower, which in the dead of night on Christmas-eve acted as a monitor, by ushering into his room with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy sound the spectres of the Christmases of the past, which taught him to reverence Christmastide for the rest of his life.

As for Dickens' marriage-bells, he can marry none of his characters without a great deal of ringing. Mark how he insists on the bells being excellent company. Mr. Pickwick's excited reveries on the night of the discovery of the famous Bill-Stumpian sculpture are dissipated by the church-bell'sounding solemnly on his ear; but when the bell ceased the silence was insupportable, he felt almost as if he had lost a companion.' 'They were company to Toby Veck: many kind things they said to him.' To the best of my belief, he has only made fun of the moral effect of bells and their associations once, viz. in Nicholas Nickleby's explanation of the part to be performed in a new play by Mr. Lenville, the heavy tragedian of Crummle's company: But just as you are raising the pistol to your head a bell strikes ten, you pause, you recollect to have heard a bell strike ten in your infancy; the pistol falls from your hand, you are overcome, burst into tears, and become a virtuous character ever afterwards.'

In his travels abroad he still displays his bell-worship. At Marseilles he notices the gaol-bell, and the bells on the draught horses; at Venice the softened ringing of the church-bells;' at Genoa 'the long strings of patient mules that go jingling their little bells through the narrow streets;' 'the gay vetturino jingling through every village;' the festa days, 'when the bells of churches ring incessantly, not in peals, but in a horrible, irregular, jerking, dingle, dingle, dingle, with a sudden stop at every fifteenth dingle or so, which is maddening.' Rome seems to him a vast wilderness of tinkling bells, from the bell that announces the elevation of the Host in St. Peter's, and the bell that gives the signal on Easter Monday for the simultaneous illumination of the great cathedral, to the bell which puts the Carnival out like a breath.' At Florence he remarks the bell of the beautiful Campanile, 'that summons the Compagnia della Misericordia to their charitable labours;' and as he returns homewards he hears the bells of Calais, and describes the night steamer which restores him to his native land as a screech, a bell, and two red eyes.' Arriving in London, like Arthur Clennam (in Little Dorrit), 'maddening church-bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Mr. Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Lud

gate-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 the 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' (like the disappointed bell' tolled by the sexton in Dombey and Son) '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.' In short, London represented to Dickens not so much the metropolis of the world as the capital of chimes, inhabited not by so many million human creatures, but by innumerable bells. He takes an interest even in bell-ringers-mysterious mouldy men, of a somewhat ghoulish character from their association with churchyards, and always shabby, like the whity-brown man whose clothes were once black, a man with flue on him and cobweb,' and the shabby little sexton who rang the church-bell, like the bull in Cock Robin, with his foot in the stirrup.' He lovingly lingers in musty old belfries, where the rules and fines of the ringers are painted in rhyme upon the walls.' He sojourns in ancient hostelries, on the signboards whereof are depicted præ-Raphaelite bells, in honour of the ringers, their frequenters. He is great on beadles, like him of Eatanswill, 'ringing an enormous bell, performing concertos on it, and fantasias by way of commanding silence among the uproarious electors of that immaculate borough ;' on the town-crier sent round with a bell to announce the opening of Crummles' theatre; on the 'Golden Dustman' (in Our Mutual Friend), clad in red plush velveteens, fantail hat, and hand-bell;' on the scarlet postman and his bell;' on the chimney-sweep's bell; on the muffin-boys' bells (to abolish which the public meeting is called in Nicholas Nickleby); on the bells on Jip's Chinese Pagoda-many of which bells, alas, are obsolete; peripatetic bells, which have been swept away by ruthless police Acts, or have died a natural death, like those of which Charles Lamb asks, What is gone with the cages with the climbing squirrel and bells to them, which were formerly the indispensable appendages to the outside of a tinman's shop?" Gone, like the passing-bell, the pancake-bell, the thief and riever's bell, morris-bells, All-hallow tide, Good Friday, St. Catherine-eve bells, bell-corn, bell-courses, and bell-prizes.

6

It is extraordinary with what glibness Dickens sets loose belltongues ever wagging at all times and on all topics. As he perambulates the highways and byways of London he is ever curiously studying the physiognomy of bell-handles, as illustrating, by some

occult resemblance or magnetic sympathy, the disposition of the householder. There is, he would say, a fund of character in the handles of door-bells; they have a phrenology of their own, possibly even a literature decipherable by the student of Belles Lettres. Witness the bell-handle on Ralph Nickleby's house in Golden-square, 'a brass model of an infant's fist grasping a fragment of a skewer.' Again, the house of the wealthy brass-founder, in whose family Tom Pinch's sister was governess, rejoiced 'in a great bell whose handle was in itself a note of admiration.'

Blindfold him, and let him but touch your bell-handle, lo! your inmost soul is revealed. He will tell you if you are hospitable or churlish, selfish or cordial, priggish or formal; whether you live in a fashionable quarter or in Seven Dials, in Belgravia or Bell-yard; whether you are a surgeon, or a bill-broker, or an attorney, or a midwife, government official, lodging-house keeper (whose door is as full of bells as a cathedral organ is of stops'), dentist, or mistress of a young ladies' seminary. He considers the manner in which a person rings a bell as a kind of synopsis of his mood at the time and of his general characteristics; e.g. Mr. Dowler rings the bell with great violence,' Mrs. Clennam with a hasty jerk,' Mr. Watkins Tottle with a faltering jerk,' Bob Sawyer as if he would pull the bell out by the roots, the Poor Relation with apologetic softness. Not only can you predicate the temperament of the ringer, but by the alacrity with which the Slaves of the Ring' answer the summons you may make a tolerable guess as to their training. What a demnition long time,' says Mr. Mantalini to Newman Noggs, you have kept me ringing at this confounded old cracked tea-kettle of a bell, every tinkle of which is enough to throw a strong man into convulsions, upon my life and soul,-oh demmit!'

Not only is the handle of a door-bell a guide to the character of the inmate, but from its sound as well you may surmise his or her nature; as in the case of Arthur Gride's bell, with its thin and piping sounds, like an old man's voice, rattling as if it were pinched with hunger;' or Sairey Gamp's door-bell, which is the greediest little bell to ring that ever was;' or the owner of the door-bell which produced only 'two dead tinkles.' Dickens furthermore revels in the use of bells as a simile, an analogy. Take two instances in Dombey and Son: in the house of mourning the accidental tinklings among the pendant lustres sounded more startling than alarm-bells;' and after the marriage of Florence and Walter, when the company, in drinking the health of the newly-married couple, clink their wine-glasses, 'there is a blithe and merry ringing, as of a little peal of marriage-bells.' And now my task is ended. I cease to ring the changes on the bells which Dickens loved so wisely, wittily, and well.

GEORGE DELAMERE COWAN.

A JOINT IN THE HARNESS

BY MARIAN NORTHCOTT, AUTHOR OF TIM TWINKLETON'S TWINS,' ETC.

A COLD, stern, self-righteous man of business, very shrewd in bargains where his own interests were concerned, and claiming the utmost privileges ready money can command; very punctual in paying his annual subscription to the charities favoured by his counte nance and support; as a creditor exacting to the uttermost farthing, yet ever ready with a liberal donation for any society likely to acknowledge his contribution in the newspapers; a modern Pharisee, who daily said in his heart, God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are,'-such was Jabez Kyte, stock- and share-broker of Debenture-court, Contango-square, E.C.

Outwardly, everything connected with Kyte inspired confidence. He had magnificent offices, well lighted, and occupying an amount of space that must have been productive of an enormous payment in the shape of rent; all his clerks presented a sleek well-to-do look; whilst the stockbroker himself took great pains with his costume, and in order to further keep up appearances (a rule of conduct in which he was a stanch believer), frequently invited a posse of his Stock-Exchange friends to sumptuous and tasteful banquets at his suburban villa.

Jabez Kyte was very rich, but, like many another City magnate, his position had originally been of the humblest-how humble he cared not to acknowledge, for he took no delight in looking back into the past and calling himself a self-made man.' His pride was of a different character. Some of his more intimate associates said he was a pauper's brat, who had commenced a business career behind a cheesemonger's counter; others declared that whilst sweeping a street-crossing the lucky chance of picking up a pocket-book, and restoring it to its rightful owner, had been the means of setting him up in life; others asserted that his youth had been spent in a lawyer's office; but whatever his inaugural step in business may have been, it was never alluded to by himself, and his guests were content to partake of his recherché banquets, and drink his excellent wines, without inquiring too closely into the antecedents of their host. He had budded into a most respectable citizen-a trifle too keen-witted in matters of business, perhaps; still a man with a high reputation, and therefore to be treated with the utmost courtesy, even if his nearest associates found it impossible to esteem him. Kyte had tired hard to win something more than cold respect, but all his