A TALE OF TWO CITIES.

1 "THE STORY OF OUR LIVES FROM TEAK TO YEAR." WEEKLY BY CHARLES ]SATURDAY, APEIL 30, 1859.[PRICEA TALE OF TWO Qfytte CHARLES THE FIRST. RECALLED TO I. THE was the best of times, it was the worstof times, it was the age of wisdom, it was theage of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief,it was the epoch of incredulity, it was theseason of Light, it was the season of Darkness,it was the spring of hope, it was the winter ofdespair, we had everything before us, we hadnothing before us, we were all going direct toHeaven, we were all going direct the other way in short, the period was so far like the presentperiod.

2 That some of its noisiest authorities in-sisted on its being received, for good or for evil,in the superlative degree of comparison were a king with a large jaw and aqueen with a plain face, on the throne of England;there were a king with a large jaw and a queenwith a fair face, on the throne of France. Inboth countries it was clearer than crystal to thelords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes,that things in general were settled for was the year of Our Lord one thousandseven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual reve-lations were conceded to England at thatfavoured period, as at this.

3 Mrs. Southcott hadrecently attained her five-and-twentieth blessedbirthday, of whom a prophetic private in theLife Guards had heralded the sublime appearanceby announcing that arrangements were made forthe swallowing up of London and the Cock-lane ghost had been laid onlya round dozen of years, after rapping out itsmessages, as the spirits of this very year last past(supernaturally deficient in originality) rappedout theirs. Mere messages in the earthly orderof vents had lately come to the English Crownand People, from a congress of British subjectsin America, which, strange to relate, haveproved more important to the human race thanany communications yet received through any ofthe chickens of the Cock-lane , less favoured on the whole as tomatters spiritual than her sister of the shield andtrident, rolled with exceeding smoothness downhill, making paper money and spending the guidance of her Christian pastors.

4 Sheentertained herself, besides, with such humaneachievements as sentencing a youth to have hishands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers,and his body burned alive, because he had notkneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirtyprocession of monks which passed within hisview, at a distance of some fifty or sixty is likely enough that, rooted in the woods ofFrance and Norway, there were growing trees,when that suffererwas put to death, already markedby the Woodman, Fate, to come down and besawn into boards, to make a certain movable frame-work with a sack and a knife in it, terrible inhistory.

5 It is likely enough that in the roughouthouses of some tillers of the heavy lands ad-jacent to Paris, there were sheltered from theweather that very day, rude carts, bespatteredwith rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, androosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death,had already set apart to be his tumbrils of theRevolution. But, that Woodman and thatFarmer, though they work unceasingly, \\orksilently, and no one heard them as they wentabout with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuchas to entertain any suspicion that they wereawake, was to be atheistical and England, there was scarcely an amount oforder and protection to justify much nationalboasting.

6 Daring burglaries by armed men, andhighway robberies, took place in the capital itselfevery night; families were publicly cautioned notto go out of town without removing their fur-niture to upholsterers' warehouses for security;the highwayman in the dark was a City trades-man in the light, and, being recognised and chal-lenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stoppedin his character of " the Captain," gallantly snothim through the head and rode away; the mailwas waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shotthree dead, and then got shot dead himself bythe other four, " in consequence of the failure ofhis ammunition:" after which the mail wasrobbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, theLord Mayor of London, ^as made to stand anddeliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman,who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight ofall his retinue.

7 Prisoners in London gaols foughtbattles with their turnkeys, and the majesty ofthe law fired blunderbusses in among them, loadedwith rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped offdiamond crosses from the necks of noble lords atCourt drawing-rooms; musketeers went into 's, to search for contraband goods, and theVOL. [April 30,1861.]ALL THE YEAR ROUND.[Conducted bymob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeersfired on the mob; and nobody thought any ofthese occurrences much out of the common the midst of them, the hangman, ever busyand ever worse than useless, was in constant re-quisition ; now, stringing up long rows of miscel-laneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreakeron Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday;now, burning people in the hand at Newgate bythe dozen, and now burning pamphlets at thedoor of Westminster Hall.]

8 To-day, taking thelife of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of awretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boyof these things, and a thousand like them,came to pass in and dose upon the dear old yearone thousand seven hundred and by them, while the Woodman and theFarmer worked unheeded, those two of the largejaws, and those other two of the plain and thefair faces, trod with stir enough, and carriedtheir divine rights with a high hand. Thus didthe year one thousand seven hundred andseventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, andmyriads of small creatures the creatures of thischronicle among the rest along the roads thatlay before H.

9 THE was the Dover road that lay, on a Fridaynight late in November, before the first of thepersons with whom this history has Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dovermail, as it lumbered up Shooter's Hill. Hewalked up-hill in the mire by the side of themail, as the rest of the passengers did; not be-cause they had the least relish for walking ex-ercise, under the circumstances, but because thehill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail,were all so heavy, that the horses had threetimes already come to a stop, besides oncedrawing the coach across the road, with themutinous iiitcut of taking it back to and wliip and coachman and guard, how-ever, in combination, had read that article ofwar which forbad a purpose otherwise stronglyin favour of the argument, that some brute ani-mals are endued with Reason.

10 And the team hadcapitulated and returned to their drooping heads and tremulous tails,they mashed their way through the thick mud,floundering and stumbling between whiles as ifthey were falling to pieces at the larger often as the driver rested them and broughtthem to a stand, with a wary " Wo-ho I so-hothen!" the near leader violently shook his headand everything upon it like an unusually em-phatic horse, denying that the coach could be gotup the MIL Whenever the leader made thisrattle, the passenger started, as a nervous pas-senger might, and was disturbed in was a steaming mist in all the hollows,and it had roamed in its forlornuess up the hill,like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding clammy and intensely-cold mist, it made itsslow way through the air in ripples that visiblyfollowed and overspread one another.