rld like Dombey are always taken in by him,
because men of the world are probably the simplest of all the children
of Adam.

Cousin Feenix again is an exquisite suggestion, with his rickety
chivalry and rambling compliments. It was about the period of _Dombey
and Son_ that Dickens began to be taken up by good society. (One can use
only vulgar terms for an essentially vulgar process.) And his sketches
of the man of good family in the books of this period show that he had
had glimpses of what that singular world is like. The aristocrats in his
earliest books are simply dragons and griffins for his heroes to fight
with--monsters like Sir Mulberry Hawk or Lord Verisopht. They are merely
created upon the old principle, that your scoundrel must be polite and
powerful--a very sound principle. The villain must be not only a
villain, but a tyrant. The giant must be larger than Jack. But in the
books of the Dombey period we have many shrewd glimpses of the queer
realities of English aristocracy. Of these Cousin Feenix is one of the
best. Cousin Feenix is a much better sketch of the essentially decent
and chivalrous aristocrat than Sir Leicester Dedlock. Both of the men
are, if you will, fools, as both are honourable gentlemen. But if one
may attempt a classification among fools, Sir Leicester Dedlock is a
stupid fool, while Cousin Feenix is a silly fool--which is much better.
The difference is that the silly fool has a folly which is always on the
borderland of wit, and even of wisdom; his wandering wits come often
upon undiscovered truths. The stupid fool is as consistent and as
homogeneous as wood; he is as invincible as the ancestral darkness.
Cousin Feenix is a good sketch of the sort of well-bred old ass who is
so fundamentally genuine that he is always saying very true things by
accident. His whole tone also, though exaggerated like everything in
Dickens, is very true to the bewildered good nature which marks English
aristocratic life. The statement that Dickens could not describe a
gentleman is, like most popular animadversions against Dickens, so very
thin and one-sided a truth as to be for serious purposes a falsehood.
When people say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, what they
mean is this, and so far what they mean is true. They mean that Dickens
could not describe a gentleman as gentlemen feel a gentleman. They mean
that he could not take that atmosphere easily, accept it as the normal
atmosphere, or descri