[Footnote 1: Surely it was not so meant, for instance, in the passage
about the _desobligeante_, which had been "standing so many months
unpitied in the corner of Monsieur Dessien's coach-yard. Much, indeed,
was not to be said for it, but something might; and, when a few words
will rescue Misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be
a churl of them." "Does anybody," asks Thackeray in a strangely
matter-of-fact fashion, "believe that this is a real sentiment? That
this luxury of generosity, this gallant rescue of Misery--out of an
old cab--is genuine feeling?" Nobody, we should say. But, on the other
hand, does anybody--or did anybody before Thackeray--suggest that it
was meant to pass for genuine feeling? Is it not an obvious piece of
mock pathetic?]

In one famous case, indeed, the failure can hardly be described as
other than ludicrous. The figure of the distraught Maria of Moulines
is tenderly drawn; the accessories of the picture--her goat, her dog,
her pipe, her song to the Virgin--though a little theatrical, perhaps,
are skilfully touched in; and so long as the Sentimental Traveller
keeps our attention fixed upon her and them the scene prospers well
enough. But, after having bidden us duly note how "the tears trickled
down her cheeks," the Traveller continues: "I sat down close by her,
and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief.
I then steeped it in my own--and then in hers--and then in mine--and
then I wiped hers again; and as I did it I felt such undescribable
emotions within me as, I am sure, could not be accounted for from any
combinations of matter and motion." The reader of this may well ask
himself in wonderment whether he is really expected to make a third
in the lachrymose group. We look at the passage again, and more
carefully, to see if, after all, we may not be intended to laugh, and
not to cry at it; but on finding, as clearly appears, that we actually
_are_ intended to cry at it the temptation to laugh becomes almost
irresistible. We proceed, however, to the account of Maria's
wanderings to Rome and back, and we come to the pretty passage which
follows:

"How she had borne it, and how she had got supported, she could
not tell; but God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb.
Shorn indeed! and to the quick, said I; and wast thou in my own
land, where I have a cottage, I would take thee to it, and shelter thee;
thou shouldst eat of my own bread and dr