onstitutional
reform and national policy. Dickens's later assaults upon the
'Circumlocution Office,' the Court of Chancery, were signal instances of
this impatient, irritable, and effeminate levity. Fitzjames elaborated
this view in an article upon 'the license of novelists' which appeared
in the 'Edinburgh Review' for July 1857. He fell foul of 'Little
Dorrit'; but the chief part of the article referred to Charles Reade's
'Never Too Late to Mend.' That novel was briefly a travesty of a recent
case in which a prisoner had committed suicide in consequence, as was
suggested, of ill-treatment by the authorities of the gaol. The governor
had been tried and punished in consequence. Fitzjames gives the actual
facts to show how Reade had allowed himself, as a writer of fiction, to
exaggerate and distort them, and had at the same time taken the airs of
an historian of facts and bragged of his resolution to brand all judges
who should dare to follow the precedent which he denounced. This
article, I may notice, included an injudicious reference to the case of
the Post Office and Rowland Hill, which was not, I believe, due to
Fitzjames himself, and which enabled Dickens to reply with some effect
in 'Household Words.' Dickens's attacks upon the 'Circumlocution Office'
and its like were not altogether inconsistent with some opinions upon
the English system of government to which, as I shall have to show,
Fitzjames himself gave forcible expression in after years. They started,
however, from a very different point of view, and for the present he
criticised both Dickens and some of the similar denunciations contained
in Carlyle's 'Past and Present,' and 'Latter-day Pamphlets.' The assault
upon the 'Circumlocution Office' was, I doubt not, especially offensive
because 'Barnacle Tite,' and the effete aristocrats who are satirised in
'Little Dorrit,' stood for representatives of Sir James Stephen and his
best friends. In fact, I think, Dickens took the view natural to the
popular mind, which always embodies a grievance in a concrete image of a
wicked and contemptible oppressor intending all the evils which result
from his office. A more interesting and appropriate topic for art of a
serious kind would be the problem presented by a body of men of the
highest ability and integrity who are yet doomed to work a cumbrous and
inadequate system. But the popular reformer, to whom everything seems
easy and obvious, explains all abuses by attributing