here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of
Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of
Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made
public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted
with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At
the present moment ^* there is a suit before the Court which was
commenced nearly twenty years ago; in which from thirty to forty
counsel have been known to appear at one time; in which costs have
been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds; which is
a friendly suit; and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termina-
tion now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit
in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close
of the last century, and in which more than double the amount of
seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted
other authorities for JARTZDYCE AND JARNDYCE, I could rain them on
these pages, to the shame of--a parsimonious public.

There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark.
The possibility of what is called Spontaneous Combustion has been
denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend MR.
LEWES (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to
have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious-
letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing
that Spontaneous Combustion could not possibly be. I have no need
to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers,
and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate
the subject. There are about thirty cases on record, of which the
most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate, was
minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a pre-
bendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in letters, who published
an account of it at Verona, in 1731, which he afterwards repub-
libhed at Rome. The appearances beyond all rational doubt observed

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