ehead, a fatal
glance, a menacing chin, an enormous hand, and a monstrous rattan. When
he laughed, which was rare and terrible, his thin lips parted and
displayed not only his teeth but his gums, and a savage, flat curl
formed round his nose. When serious he was a bulldog, when he laughed he
was a tiger. His guiding principles--or perhaps instincts is the more
appropriate word--were respect for authority and hatred of rebellion. In
his eyes all crimes were only forms of rebellion. Give a human face,
writes Hugo, to the dog-son of a she-wolf and we shall have Javert. No
wonder that his glance was a gimlet, or that his whole life was divided
between watching and overlooking. And, as if all this analytic
rodomontade was not enough, we are told in characteristic rhetorical
vagueness that he was a pitiless watchman, a marble-hearted spy, a
Brutus contained in a Vidocq.

Readers of Dickens will remember that Mr. Bucket appears on the scene in
Bleak House in a weird and mysterious way, which suggests that Inspector
Byrne, of New York, had been a student of lawyer Tulkinghorn's methods
when he undertook to pump Alderman Jaehne. The sly lawyer is plying
Snagsby with rare old port in the dim twilight and evolving his story,
when suddenly the victim becomes conscious of the presence of "a person
with a hat and stick in his hand, who was not there when he himself came
in, and has not since entered by either of the windows." This composed
and quiet listener is "a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man
in black, of about middle age," and he looks at Snagsby "as if he was
going to take his portrait." When the poor, hen-pecked wretch, who has
thus been drawn into the legal confessional, learns that Mr. Bucket is a
detective officer, "there is a strong tendency in the clump of Snagsby's
hair to stand on end."

The method of Bucket consists partly of gross flattery and of being "all
things to all men," as Saint Paul somewhere advises. "You're a man of
the world," he says to Snagsby; "a man of business and a man of sense.
That's what you are, and therefore it is unnecessary to tell you to keep
QUIET." He flatters the gorgeous flunkey at Chesney Wold by adroitly
commending his statuesque proportions, and hinting that he has a
friend--a Royal Academy sculptor--who may one of those days make a
drawing of his proportions. Further, to elicit the confidence of the
vain and empty-headed Jeames, Bucket declares that his own father was
su