aggravated assaults – and above all let us, in such cases, have no
Pet Prisoning, vain glorifying, strong soup, and roasted meats, but
hard work, and one unchanging and uncompromising dietary of bread
and water, well or ill; and we shall do much better than by going
down into the dark to grope for the whip among the rusty fragments
of the rack, and the branding iron, and the chains and gibbet from
the public roads, and the weights that pressed men to death in the
cells of Newgate.
I had proceeded thus far, when I found I had been lying awake so
long that the very dead began to wake too, and to crowd into my
thoughts most sorrowfully. Therefore, I resolved to lie awake no
more, but to get up and go out for a night walk – which resolution
was an acceptable relief to me, as I dare say it may prove now to a
great many more.
THE GHOST OF ART
I AM a bachelor, residing in rather a dreary set of chambers in the
Temple. They are situated in a square court of high houses, which
would be a complete well, but for the want of water and the absence
of a bucket. I live at the top of the house, among the tiles and
sparrows. Like the little man in the nursery-story, I live by
myself, and all the bread and cheese I get – which is not much – I
put upon a shelf. I need scarcely add, perhaps, that I am in love,
and that the father of my charming Julia objects to our union.
I mention these little particulars as I might deliver a letter of
introduction. The reader is now acquainted with me, and perhaps
will condescend to listen to my narrative.
I am naturally of a dreamy turn of mind; and my abundant leisure –
for I am called to the Bar – coupled with much lonely listening to
the twittering of sparrows, and the pattering of rain, has
encouraged that disposition. In my ‘top set’ I hear the wind howl
on a winter night, when the man on the ground floor believes it is
perfectly still weather. The dim lamps with which our Honourable
Society (supposed to be as yet unconscious of the new discovery
called Gas) make the horrors of the staircase visible, deepen the
gloom which generally settles on my soul when I go home at night.
I am in the Law, but not of it. I can’t exactly make out what it
means. I sit in Westminster Hall sometimes (in character) from ten
to four; and when I go out of Court, I don’t know whether I am
standing on my wig or my boots.
It appears to me (I mention this in confidence) as if there were
too much talk and too much law – as if some grains of truth were
started overboard into a tempestuous sea of chaff.
All this may make me mystical. Still, I am confident that what I
am going to describe myself as having seen and heard, I actually
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
did see and hear.
It is necessary that I should observe that I have a great delight
in pictures. I am no painter myself, but I have studied pictures
and written about them. I have seen all the most famous pictures
in the world; my education and reading have been sufficiently
general to possess me beforehand with a knowledge of most of the
subjects to which a Painter is likely to have recourse; and,
although I might be in some doubt as to the rightful fashion of the
scabbard of King Lear’s sword, for instance, I think I should know
King Lear tolerably well, if I happened to meet with him.
I go to all the Modern Exhibitions every season, and of course I
revere the Royal Academy. I stand by its forty Academical articles
almost as firmly as I stand by the thirty-nine Articles of the
Church of England. I am convinced that in neither case could there
be, by any rightful possibility, one article more or less.
It is now exactly three years – three years ago, this very month –