y a face illustrated
involuntarily the loveliest line in the noblest ode in the language,
where Dryden has sung even of a warrior--

"And now and then a sigh he heaved,
And tears began to flow."

The subdued voice of the Reader, moreover, accorded tenderly with one's
remembrance of his own acknowledgment ten years after his completion of
the book from which this story was extracted, that with a heavy heart he
had walked the streets of Paris alone during the whole of one winter's
night, while he and his little friend parted company for ever! Charles
Young's son, the vicar of Ilminster, has, recently, in his own Diary
appended to his memoir of his father, the tragedian, related a curious
anecdote, illustrative, in a very striking way, of the grief--the
profound and overwhelming grief--excited in a mind and heart like
those of Lord Jeffrey, by the imaginary death of another of these
dream-children of Charles Dickens. The editor of the _Edinburgh Review_,
we there read, was surprised by Mrs. Henry Siddons, seated in his
library, with his head on the table, crying. "Delicately retiring," we
are then told, "in the hope that her entrance had been unnoticed," Mrs.
Siddons observed that Jeffrey raised his head and was kindly beckoning
her back. The Diary goes on: "Perceiving that his cheek was flushed
and his eyes suffused with tears, she apologised for her intrusion,
and begged permission to withdraw. When he found that she was seriously
intending to leave him, he rose from his chair, took her by both hands,
and led her to a seat." Then came the acknowledgment prefaced by Lord
Jeffrey's remark that he was "a great goose to have given way so."
Little Nell was dead! The newly published number of "Master Humphrey's
Clock" (No. 44) was lying before him, in which he had just been reading
of the general bereavement!

Referring to another of these little creatures' deaths, that of Tiny
Tim, Thackeray wrote in the July number of _Fraser_, for 1844, that
there was one passage regarding it about which a man would hardly
venture to speak in print or in public "any more than he would of any
other affections of his private heart."

It has been related, even of the burly demagogue, O'Connell, that
on first reading of Nell's death in the Old Curiosity Shop, he
exclaimed--his eyes running over with tears while he flung the leaves
indignantly out of the window--"he should not have killed her--he should
not have killed her: she w