Little David Copperfield is a
jewel of a boy with a turn for books. Doubtless he is created out of
Dickens's memories of himself as a child. That is true pathos again, and
not overwrought, when David is sent to Creakle's, and his poor troubled
mother dare hardly say farewell to him.

And this brings us back to that debatable thing--the pathos of
Dickens--from which one has been withdrawn by the attractions of his
boys. Little Dombey is a prize example of his pathos. Little Nell is
another. Jeffrey, of the _Edinburgh Review_, who criticised "Marmion"
and the "Lady of the Lake" so vindictively, shed tears over Little Nell.
It is a matter of taste, or, as Science might say, of the lachrymal
glands as developed in each individual. But the lachrymal glands of this
amateur are not developed in that direction. Little Dombey and Little
Nell leave me with a pair of dry eyes. I do not "melt visibly" over
Little Dombey, like the weak-eyed young man who took out his books and
trunk to the coach. The poor little chap was feeble and feverish, and
had dreams of trying to stop a river with his childish hands, or to choke
it with sand. It may be very good pathology, but I cannot see that it is
at all right pathos. One does not like copy to be made out of the
sufferings of children or of animals. One's heart hardens: the object is
too manifest, the trick is too easy. Conceive a child of Dombey's age
remarking, with his latest breath, "Tell them that the picture on the
stairs at school is not Divine enough!" That is not the delirium of
infancy, that is art-criticism: it is the _Athenaeum_ on Mr. Holman Hunt.
It is not true to nature; it is not good in art: it is the kind of thing
that appears in Sunday-school books about the virtuous little boy who
died. There is more true pathos in many a page of "Huckleberry Finn."
Yet this is what Jeffrey gushed over. "There has been nothing like the
actual dying of that sweet Paul." So much can age enfeeble the
intellect, that he who had known Scott, and yet nibbled at his fame,
descended to admiring the feeblest of false sentiment. As for Little
Nell, who also has caused floods of tears to be shed, her case is
sufficiently illustrated by the picture in the first edition ("Master
Humphrey's Clock,", 1840, p. 210):

"'When I die
Put near me something that has loved the light,
And had the sky above it always.' Those
Were her words."

"Dear, gentle, patient,