of the common world. He is a money-making, grasping man, yet with a bitter
savour of satire about him which raises him out of the common place.
Presently it turns out, that by putting his hand to his heart he can
draw away bank-notes,--only that it is his life he is drawing away. The
conception is fine and imaginative, and ought to rank with the best of
those philosophical stories so fashionable in the last century. Its
working-out in the every-day part is brilliant and pungent; and much
ingenuity is shown in connecting the tragic and mysterious element in
Jericho's life with the ordinary, vain, worldly existence of his wife
and daughters. It is startling to find ourselves in the regions of the
impossible, just as we are beginning to know the persons of the fable. But
the mind reassures itself. This Jericho, with his mysterious fate,--is
not he, in this twilight of fiction, shadowing to us the real destiny of
real money-grubbers whom we may see any day about our doors? Has not the
money become the very life of many such? And so feeling, the reader goes
pleasantly on,--just excited a little, and raised out of the ordinary
temperature in which fiction is read, by the mystic atmosphere through
which he sees things,--and ends, acknowledging that with much pleasure he
has also gathered a good moral. For his mere amusement the best fireworks
have been cracking round him on his journey. In short, I esteem this
Jerrold's best book,--the one which contains most of his mind. Certain
aspects of his mind, indeed, may be seen even to better advantage in others
of his works; his sentimental side, for instance, in "Clovernook," where
he has let his fancy run riot like honeysuckle, and overgrow every thing;
his wit in "Time works Wonders," which blazes with epigrams like Vauxhall
with lamps. But "A Man made of Money" is the completest of his books as
a creation, and the most characteristic in point of style,--is based on
a principle which predominated in his mind,--is the most original in
imaginativeness, and the best sustained in point and neatness, of the works
he has left.