Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart and that he set up no monopoly himself in being unjustly treated by this monstrous system.

“There again!” said Mr. Gridley with no diminution of his rage.  “The system!  I am told on all hands, it’s the system.  I mustn’t look to individuals.  It’s the system.  I mustn’t go into court and say, ’My Lord, I beg to know this from you—­is this right or wrong?  Have you the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore am dismissed?’ My Lord knows nothing of it.  He sits there to administer the system.  I mustn’t go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and say to him when he makes me furious by being so cool and satisfied—­as they all do, for I know they gain by it while I lose, don’t I?—­I mustn’t say to him, ’I will have something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means or foul!’ He is not responsible.  It’s the system.  But, if I do no violence to any of them, here—­I may!  I don’t know what may happen if I am carried beyond myself at last!  I will accuse the individual workers of that system against me, face to face, before the great eternal bar!”

His passion was fearful.  I could not have believed in such rage without seeing it.

“I have done!” he said, sitting down and wiping his face.  “Mr. Jarndyce, I have done!  I am violent, I know.  I ought to know it.  I have been in prison for contempt of court.  I have been in prison for threatening the solicitor.  I have been in this trouble, and that trouble, and shall be again.  I am the man from Shropshire, and I sometimes go beyond amusing them, though they have found it amusing, too, to see me committed into custody and brought up in custody and all that.  It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained myself.  I tell them that if I did restrain myself I should become imbecile.  I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I believe.  People in my part of the country say they remember me so, but now I must have this vent under my sense of injury or nothing could hold my wits together.  It would be far better for you, Mr. Gridley,’ the Lord Chancellor told me last week, ’not to waste your time here, and to stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.’  ‘My Lord, my Lord, I know it would,’ said I to him, ’and it would have been far better for me never to have heard the name of your high office, but unhappily for me, I can’t undo the past, and the past drives me here!’ Besides,” he added, breaking fiercely out, “I’ll shame them.  To the last, I’ll show myself in that court to its shame.  If I knew when I was going to die, and could be carried there, and had a voice to speak with, I would die there, saying, ’You have brought me here and sent me from here many and many a time.  Now send me out feet foremost!’”

His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was quiet.