"When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. When mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung above the howling ocean dreadfully. When light-houses on rocks and headlands showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birds breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead. When little readers of story-books, by the firelight, trembled to think of Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the Robbers' Cave, or had some small misgivings that the fierce little old woman with the crutch, who used to start out of the box in the merchant Abudah's bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon the stairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey to bed.

"When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of daylight died away from the ends of avenues; and the trees, arching overhead, were sullen and black. When, in parks and woods, the high wet fern and sodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks of trees, were lost to view, in masses of impenetrable shade. When mists arose from dyke, and fen, and river. When lights in old halls and in cottage windows were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, the wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turnpike-gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in the fields, the labourer and team went home, and the striking of the church-clock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the church-yard wicket would be swung no more that night."

Dickens is essentially a moralist, and one who seeks to impress his principles in many extraordinary ways, and amongst others, that of the most unmerciful caricature, so severe as to be unfailing in its effect. There is no disguising the fact that in the writings of this most amusing author-even when in the happiest vein of his pleasantry and satire, there lurks a powerful moral, which, when dragged out from its singular hiding-place, is found to be full of grave profit to the observer, who is fascinated by the ingenuity of the scribe.

The Haunted Man" has a moral-and a healthy one too. The author has seized upon one of the melancholy hypochondriacs which are not unfrequently to be met with in some circles of society. There are such things in the world as miserable men, and Redlaw, the haunted man, is one of them. He ruminates everlastingly on an unforgiven injury inflicted in days gone by. Here he is :

"Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken, brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled seaweed, about his face-as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of huma

nity-but might have said he looked like a haunted man? Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man? Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a haunted man ? Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory-for he was, as all the world knew far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily-who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs, and implements, and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, monstrous among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids) trembling at heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour;-who that had seen him there, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too. Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that every thing around him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on haunted ground?"

He broods over his melancholy fate-remembering his sorrow the more in trying to forget it—and a grim ghost arrives, and, with that peculiar power vested in these mysterious agents, promises him forgetfulness on certain conditions. This is

The Ghost's Bargain." Yet, notwithstanding the introduction of the ghostly visitor, the story has none of that foolishness generally to be found in tales where supernatural agents are at work, and which writers of that class seem to think necessary to the preservation of a sort of deceptive illusion which they think indispensable to success. The Phantom, of course, has no physical being, but is merely a personification of Redlaw's conscience, which haunts him in remembrance of the deeds of earlier ages.

But in vain he seeks the waters of oblivion. They have no ingredient strong enough to drown his busy brain in sweet forgetfulness. All the combinations of his powerful art—for he was an alchymist-afford nothing equal to his wants; and he appeals to the Dark Power, with whom he has had dealings, to

take back the fatal gift, with the following beautiful apostrophe:--

"Phantoms! Punishers of impious thoughts!' cried Redlaw, gazing round in anguish, look upon me! From the darkness of my mind, let the glimmering of contrition that I know is there, shine up and show my misery! In the material world, as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made in the great universe. I know not that it is the same with good and evil, happiness and sorrow, in the memories of men. Pity me! Relieve me! Shadow of myself! Spirit of my darker hours! come back and haunt me day and night, but take this gift away! Or, if it must still rest with me, deprive me of the dreadful power of giving it to others. Undo what I have done. Leave me benighted, but restore the day to those whom I have cursed.'"

How many mortals-weary of themselves-would say as the Haunted Man has said, though perhaps in less forcible words! Still, it is the language of the heart,-the genuine unreserved expression of a soul sighing beneath a load which weighs it almost to the ground. It is in such passages as these that Mr. Dickens shows the greatness of a master mind.

The description of the Phantom is powerful and full of that peculiar kind of wildness so completely in keeping with the subject. It certainly has been in some measure borrowed from the Book of Job-to compare great things with small-nor can it be said to Mr. Dickens's disparagement that he should adopt so great an original :

"As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in the place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees,-or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process, not to be traced by any human sense,-an awful likeness of himself!

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Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into its terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound. As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chairback, close above him, with its appaling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore.

"This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. This was the dread companion of the haunted man!

The injury over which Redlaw broods so unceasingly, is one inflicted by a friend of his early days who rivals him in love, and ultimately married the object of Redlaw's affections.

The Haunted Man converses occasionally with the ghost:

"If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would,' the Ghost repeated. 'If I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!' "Evil spirit of myself,' returned the haunted man, in a low, trembling tone, my life is darkened by that incessant whisper.' "It is an echo,' said the Phantom. "If it be an echo of my thoughts--as now, indeed, I know it is,' rejoined the haunted man, why should I, therefore, be tormented? It is not a selfish thought. I suffer it to range beyond myself. All men and women have their sorrows,-most of them their wrongs: ingratitude, and sordid jealousy, and interest, besetting all degrees of life. Who would not forget their sorrows and their wrongs?'

"Who would not, truly, and be the happier and better for it ? ' said the Phantom."

To his astonishment, the Haunted Man meets with one object that successfully thwarts the terrible influence he has derived from the ghost. This is a miserable boy,-the child as he afterwards discovers of his friend. This character is meant to display the wretchedness of ignorance accompanied by poverty and want. Redlaw inquires of the Phantom the reason why he resists the influences imparted to him by the ghost :

"This,' said the Phantom, pointing to the boy, 'is the last, completest illustration of a human creature, utterly bereft of such remembrances as you have yielded up. No softening memory of sorrow, wrong, or trouble enters here, because this wretched mortal from his birth has been abandoned to a worse condition than the beasts, and has within his knowledge no one contrast, no humanising touch, to make a grain of such a memory spring up in his hardened breast. All within this desolate creature is barren wilderness. All within the man bereft of what you have resigned is the same barren wilderness. Woe to such a man! Woe, tenfold, to the nation that shall count its monsters such as this lying here by hundreds and by thousands!'

"Redlaw shrunk, appaled, from what he heard.

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There is not,' said the Phantom, one of these-not one-but sows a harvest that mankind MUST reap. From every seed of evil in this boy a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world, until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another Deluge. Open and unpunished murder in a city's streets

would be less guilty in its daily toleration, than one such spectacle as this.'

by whose side, in his there is not a mother land; there is no one

"It seemed to look down upon the boy in his sleep. Redlaw, too, looked down upon him with a new emotion. "There is not a father,' said the Phantom, daily or his nightly walk, these creatures pass; among all the ranks of loving mothers in this risen from the state of childhood, but shall be responsible in his or her degree for this enormity. There is not a country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse. There is no religion upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people upon earth it would not put to shame.'

The application of an ennobling moral is here beautifully displayed,-one which shall live long after Dickens shall have ceased to add to the literary laurels of this land. There can be no finer incentive to embark in the hazardous undertaking of the pen, than that of awakening the kinder feelings of our nature to a sense of the misery, the wretchedness and degradation of the species which is going on every day-aye, every hour-around us, and almost seeming to increase as we gain ground in knowledge that should have for its object the softening of the sorrows of mankind. This is evidently the moral of the tale, and a hallowed one it is,-one that we hope will not be thrown away as the idle invention of a fine imagination. It is indeed no phantasy, but a stern and hideous truth which it were vain to try to hide.

Apart from the sadder portions of the tale we have the weight of the story lightened by flashes of Nature, told in Mr. Dickens's raciest style; and we have nothing much better to quote than a description of little Johnny Tetterby and the "babby:

"It was a very Moloch of a baby, on whose insatiate altar the whole existence of this particular young brother was offered up a daily sacrifice. Its personality may be said to have consisted in its never being quiet, in any one place, for five consecutive minutes, and never going to sleep when required. Tetterby's baby' was as well known in the neighbourhood as the postman or the potboy. It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the Tumblers or the Monkey, and came up, all on one side, a little too late for everything that was attractive, from Monday morning until Saturday night. Wherever childhood congregated to play, there was little Moloch making Johnny fag and toil. Wherever Johnny desired to stay, little Moloch became fractious, and would not remain.