le
weep like anything by these simple means. Ouida can do it; plenty of
people can do it. Dickens lives by virtue of what none but he can do: by
virtue of Sairey Gamp, and Sam Weller, and Dick Swiveller, and Mr.
Squeers, with a thousand other old friends, of whom we can never weary.
No more than Cleopatra's can custom stale _their_ infinite variety.

I do not say that Dickens' pathos is always of the too facile sort, which
plays round children's death-beds. Other pathos he has, more fine and
not less genuine. It may be morbid and contemptible to feel "a great
inclination to cry" over David Copperfield's boyish infatuation for
Steerforth; but I feel it. Steerforth was a "tiger,"--as Major Pendennis
would have said, a tiger with his curly hair and his ambrosial whiskers.
But when a little boy loses his heart to a big boy he does not think of
this. Traddles thought of it. "Shame, J. Steerforth!" cried Traddles,
when Steerforth bullied the usher. Traddles had not lost his heart, nor
set up the big boy as a god in the shrine thereof. But boys do these
things; most of us have had our Steerforths--tall, strong, handsome,
brave, good-humoured. Far off across the years I see the face of such an
one, and remember that emotion which is described in "David Copperfield,"
chap. xix., towards the end of the chapter. I don't know any other
novelist who has touched this young and absolutely disinterested belief
of a little boy in a big one--touched it so kindly and seriously, that is
there is a hint of it in "Dr. Birch's School Days."

But Dickens is always excellent in his boys, of whom he has drawn dozens
of types--all capital. There is Tommy Traddles, for example. And how
can people say that Dickens could not draw a gentleman? The boy who
shouted, "Shame, J. Steerforth!" was a gentleman, if one may pretend to
have an opinion about a theme so difficult. The Dodger and Charley Bates
are delightful boys--especially Bates. Pip, in the good old days, when
he was the prowling boy, and fought Herbert Pocket, was not less
attractive, and Herbert himself, with his theory and practice of the art
of self-defence--could Nelson have been more brave, or Shelley (as in Mr.
Matthew Arnold's opinion) more "ineffectual"? Even the boys at Dotheboys
Hall are each of them quite distinct. Dickens's boys are almost as dear
to me as Thackeray's--as little Rawdon himself. There is one exception.
I cannot interest myself in Little Dombey.