unmitigatedly satiric than that of the two last, must answer
for much that is unpleasant in the book. The repulsiveness
of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the
reader at the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as
seriously as it deserves. And yet when we judge it
deliberately, it will be seen that, here again, the story is
admirably adapted to the moral. The constructive ingenuity
exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing could be more
happily imagined, as a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine,
the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little
way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the
hereditary legislators of a great country. It is with a very
bitter irony that the paper, on which all this depends, is
left to float for years at the will of wind and tide. What,
again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn
arraignment of the pleasures and privileges of its splendid
occupants? The horrible laughter, stamped for ever "by order
of the king" upon the face of this strange spokesman of
democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to the scene;
in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer:
"If I am vile, is it not your system that has made me so?"
This ghastly laughter gives occasion, moreover, for the one
strain of tenderness running through the web of this
unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl Dea, for the
monster. It is a most benignant providence that thus
harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one