now picking up heart to say that "they cannot read Dickens," and
that they particularly detest "Pickwick." I believe it was young

ladies who first had the courage of their convictions in this
respect. "Tout sied aux belles," and the fair, in the confidence of

youth, often venture on remarkableconfessions. In your "Natural
History of Young Ladies" I do not remember that you describe the

Humorous Young Lady. {1} She is a very rare bird indeed, and humour
generally is at a deplorably low level in England.

Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since you left us; and it
may be said that inordinate philanthropy, genteelsympathy with

Irish murder and arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, Esoteric
Buddhism, and a score of other plagues, including what was once

called AEstheticism, are all, primarily, due to want of humour.
People discuss, with the gravest faces, matters which properly

should only be stated as the wildest paradoxes. It naturally
follows that, in a period almost destitute of humour, many

respectable persons "cannot read Dickens," and are not ashamed to
glory in their shame. We ought not to be angry with others for

their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the cretins who boast that
they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel

Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.
How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour! Is

there any profoundpsychological truth to be gathered from
consideration of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty? A

hundred years ago, eighty years ago--nay, fifty years ago--we were a
cruel but also a humorous people. We had bull-baitings, and badger-

drawings, and hustings, and prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went
to see men hanged; the pillory and the stocks were no empty "terrors

unto evil-doers," for there was commonly a malefactor occupying each
of these institutions. With all this we had a broad-blown comic

sense. We had Hogarth, and Bunbury, and George Cruikshank, and
Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees, and the creator of Tittlebat

Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the "Noctes," and, above all, we
had YOU.

From the old giants of English fun--burly persons delighting in
broad caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing

blows at the more prominent and obvious human follies--from these
you derived the splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your

earlier works. Mr. Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all
the Pickwickians, and Mr. Dowler, and John Browdie--these and their

immortal companions were reared, so to speak, on the beef and beer
of that naughty, fox-hunting, badger-baiting old England, which we

have improved out of existence. And these characters, assuredly,
are your best; by them, though stupid people cannot read about them,

you will live while there is a laugh left among us. Perhaps that
does not assure you a very prolonged existence, but only the future

can show.
The dismalseriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for

ever and a day. Honest old Laughter, the true LUTIN of your
inspiration, must have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though

it is true that the taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and
plots constructed after your favourite fashion ("Great Expectations"

and the "Tale of Two Cities" are exceptions) may go by and never be
regretted. Were people simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far

as your pathos is concerned, a generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-
headed shallowcritic, who declared that Wordsworth "would never

do," cried, "wept like anything," over your Little Nell. One still
laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller; but who can cry over

Little Nell?
Ah, Sir, how could you--who knew so intimately, who remembered so

strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood-
-how could you "wallow naked in the pathetic," and massacre

holocausts of the Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a
child's death-bed, was it worthy of you? Was it the kind of work

over which our hearts should melt? I confess that Little Nell might
die a dozen times, and be welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I

(like the bereaved fowl mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain
unmoved.

She was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single dam,

wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over
your Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual

calm; and probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers.
But about matter of this kind, and the unseating of the fountains of

tears, who can argue? Where is taste? where is truth? What tears
are "manly, Sir, manly," as Fred Bayham has it; and of what

lamentations ought we rather to be ashamed? Sunt lacrymae rerum;
one has been moved in the cell where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or

by the river-banks where Syracusan arrows slew the parched Athenians
among the mire and blood; or, in fiction, when Colonel Newcome says

Adsum, or over the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or where Aramis
laments, with strange tears, the death of Porthos. But over Dombey

(the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel.
When an author deliberately sits down and says, "Now, let us have a

good cry," he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least
in many breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of "Dombey and Son"

there is little we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots;
just as we forget the melodramatics of "Martin Chuzzlewit." I have

read in that book a score of times; I never see it but I revel in
it--in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and the Americans. But what the

plot is all about, what Jonas did, what Montagu Tigg had to make in
the matter, what all the pictures with plenty of shading illustrate,

I have never been able to comprehend. In the same way, one of your
most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the licence of private

conversation) that "Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;" and
probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little

precipitous.
"Too steep:"--the slang expresses that defect of an ardentgenius,

carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its
grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to

press fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the
indigo, that was the failing which proved you mortal. To take an

instance in little: when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy
thought the seedsman "a very happy man to have so many little

drawers in his shop." The reflection is thoroughlyboyish; but then
you add, "I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted

of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom." That is not
boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at

work.
"So we arraign her; but she," the Genius of Charles Dickens, how

brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain
of laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt

in the neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy
would be, how "dispeopled of her dreams," if, in some ruin of the

social system, the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger,
and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller,

and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with
Menander's men and women! We cannot think of our world without

them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more essential
than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn

flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms. May we not
almost welcome "Free Education"? for every Englishman who can read,

unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for you.
P.S.--Alas, how strangely are we tempered, and how strong is the

national bias! I have been saying things of you that I would not
hear an enemy say. When I read, in the criticism of an American

novelist, about your "hysterical emotionality" (for he writes in
American), and your "waste of verbiage," I am almost tempted to deny

that our Dickens has a single fault, to deem you impeccable!
LETTER--To Pierre de Ronsard (Prince of Poets)

Master And Prince of Poets,--As we know what choice thou madest of a
sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of Fate), so