noble Nell was dead!"

The pathos is about as good as the prose, and _that_ is blank verse. Are
the words in the former quotation in the least like anything that a
little girl would say? A German sentimentalist might have said them;
Obermann might have murmured them in his weaker moments. Let us try a
piece of domestic pathos by another hand. It is the dawn of Waterloo.

"Heart-stained and shame-stricken, he stood at the bed's foot, and looked
at the sleeping girl. How dared he--who was he--to pray for one so
spotless! God bless her! God bless her! He came to the bedside, and
looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep, and he bent over
the pillow noiselessly towards the gentle pale face. Two fair arms
closed tenderly round his neck as he stooped down. 'I am awake, George,'
the poor child said, with a sob."

I know I am making enemies of a large proportion of the readers of this
page. "Odious, sneering beast!" is the quotation which they will apply,
perhaps unconscious of its origin, to a critic who is humble but would
fain be honest, to a critic who thinks that Dickens has his weak places,
and that his pathos is one of these. It cannot be helped. Each of us
has his author who is a favourite, a friend, an idol, whose immaculate
perfection he maintains against all comers. For example, things are
urged against Scott; I receive them in the attitude of the deaf adder of
St. Augustine, who stops one ear with his tail and presses the other
against the dust. The same with Moliere: M. Scherer utters complaints
against Moliere! He would not convince me, even if I were convinced. So,
with regard to Dickens, the true believer will not listen, he will not be
persuaded. But if any one feels a little shaken, let him try it another
way. There is a character in M. Alphonse Daudet's "Froment Jeune et
Rissler Aine"--a character who, people say, is taken bodily from Dickens.
This is Desiree Delobelle, the deformed girl, the daughter of _un rate_,
a pretentious imbecile actor. She is poor, stunted, laborious, toiling
at a small industry; she is in love, is rejected, she tries to drown
herself, she dies. The sequence of ideas is in Dickens's vein; but read
the tale, and I think you will see how little the thing is overdone, how
simple and unforced it is, compared with analogous persons and scenes in
the work of the English master. The idiotic yell of "plagiarism" has
been raised, of course, by critical _cr