Here are a few comparisons. Mr. Larry, in bestowing a bachelor’s blessing on Miss Cross, before “somebody” came to claim her for his own, “held the fair face from him to look at the well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.” As old as Adam here means so long ago as Adam’s time; while Methuselah suggests great age. Thus Miss Jellyby relieved her mind to Miss Summerson on the subject of Mr. Quale, in the following energetic language:—“If he were to come with his great shining, lumpy forehead, night after night, till he was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn’t have anything to say to him.” And Mr. Filer, in his eminently practical remarks on the lamentable ignorance of political economy on the part of working people in connexion with marriage, observed to Alderman Cute that a man may live to be as old as Methuselah, and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people; but there could be no more hope of persuading them that they had no right or business to be married, than he could hope to persuade them that they had no earthly right or business to be born. Miss Betsy Trotwood declared to Mr. Dick that the natural consequence of David Copperfield’s mother having married a murderer—or a man with a name very like it—was to set the boy a-prowling and wandering about the country, “like Cain before he was grown up.” Joe Gargery’s journeyman, on going away from his work at night, used to slouch out of the shop like Cain, or the Wandering Jew, as if he had no idea where he was going, and had no intention of ever coming back. Describing the state of “the thriving City of Eden,” when Martin and Mark arrived there, the author of “Martin Chuzzlewit” says—“The waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before, so choked with slime and matted growth was the hideous swamp which bore that name.” The Deluge suggests Noah’s ark. The following reference to it is from “Little Dorrit,” descriptive of the gradual approach of darkness up among the highest ridges of the Alps:—“The ascending night came up the mountains like a rising water. When at last it rose to the walls of the convent of the great St. Bernard, it was as if that weather-beaten structure were another ark, and floated on the shadowy waves.” Here is something from the Tower of Babel:—“Looming heavy in the black wet night, the tall chimneys of the Coketown factories rose high into the air, and looked as if they were so many competing towers of Babel.” When Mortimer Lightwood inquired of Charley Hexam, with reference to the body of the man found in the river, whether or not any means had been employed to restore life, he received this reply:—“You wouldn’t ask, sir, if you knew his state. Pharoah’s multitude that were drowned in the Red Sea ain’t more beyond restoring to life.” The boy added, further, “that if Lazarus