Page:The Anatomy of Tobacco.pdf/14

 sisted, in which living and dying were hideously and awfully mingled. It is interesting, indeed, to trace this "pattern on the carpet" through very many of Poe's most famous stories, in forms of curious and intricate variety. It is latent in "The Fall of the House of Usher" it is patent in the dreadful tale of the man mesmerised in the act of death, it is openly prophesied in a story the title of which I have forgotten, wherein the dead man registers the slow changes in the process of consciousness, as the bodily tissue melts and decays. Dickens, on the other hand, had an idea simpler and more magnificent. He believed in God and all goodness, that is, that the end was well. He knew quite as much about hardships, scorn and poverty, stinks and sinks and stenches, lice and foul living of all sorts as the nastiest of the Russians; yet he knew that the end was well. The Marshalsea Prison was a horrible hole without doubt, just as Hell is a horrible hole on a much more splendid scale in Dante. But Dante's book is called "The Divine Comedy," and one