image; “why should you particularly like a man who resembles

you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound

you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for

taking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away

from, and what you might have been! Change places with him, and

would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as he was, and

commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have

it out in plain words! You hate the fellow!”

He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a

few minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling

over the table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

down upon him.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

Chapter XI

THE JACKAL

T

hose were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So

very great is the improvement Time has brought about in

such habits, that a moderate statement of the quantity of

wine and punch which one man would swallow in the course of a

night, without any detriment to his reputation as a perfect

gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration.

The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any

other learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither

was Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and

lucrative practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any

more than in the drier parts of the legal race.

A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr.

Stryver had begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the

ladder on which he mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey had now to

summon their favourite, specially, to their longing arms; and

shouldering itself towards the visage of the Lord Chief Justice in

the Court of King’s Bench, the florid countenance of Mr. Stryver

might be daily seen, bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great

sunflower pushing its way at the sun from among a rank gardenful

of flaring companions.

It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a

glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had

not that faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of

statements, which is among the most striking and necessary of the

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

advocate’s accomplishments. But, a remarkable improvement

came upon him as to this. The more business he got, the greater

his power seemed to grow of getting at its pith and marrow; and

however late at night he sat carousing with Sydney Carton, he

always had his points at his fingers’ ends in the morning.

Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was

Stryver’s great ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary

term and Michaelmas, might have floated a king’s ship. Stryver