as too good!"

Finally, another Scotch critic and judge, Lord Cockburn, writing to the
Novelist on the very morrow of reading the memorable fifth number of
"Dombey and Son," in which the death of Little Paul is so exquisitely
depicted--offering his grateful acknowledgments to the Author for the
poignant grief he had caused him--added, "I have felt my heart purified
by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them."

Hardly can it be matter for wonder, therefore, remarking how the printed
pages would draw such tokens of sympathy from men like Cockburn, and
Jeffrey, and Thackeray, and O'Connell, that a mixed audience showed
traces of emotion when the profoundly sympathetic voice of Dickens
himself related this story of the Life and Death of Little Dombey. Yet
the pathetic beauty of the tale, for all that, was only dimly hinted at
throughout,--the real pathos of it, indeed, being only fully indicated
almost immediately before its conclusion. Earlier in the Reading, in
fact, the drollery of the comic characters introduced--of themselves
irresistible--would have been simply paramount, but for the incidental
mention of the mother's death, when clinging to that frail spar within
her arms, her little daughter, "she drifted out upon the dark and
unknown sea that rolls round all the world." Paul's little wistful face
looked out every now and then, it is true, from among the fantastic
forms and features grouped around him, with a growing sense upon the
hearer of what was really meant by the child being so "old-fashioned."
But the ludicrous effect of those surrounding characters was nothing
less than all-mastering in its predominance.

There was Mrs. Pipchin, for example, that grim old lady with a mottled
face like bad marble, who acquired an immense reputation as a manager
of children, by the simple device of giving them everything they didn't
like and nothing that they did! Whose constitution required mutton chops
hot and hot, and buttered toast in similar relays! And with whom one of
Little Dombey's earliest dialogues in the Reading awakened invariably
such bursts of hearty laughter! Seated in his tall, spindle-legged
arm-chair by the fire, staring steadily at the exemplary Pipchin, Little
Paul, we were told, was asked [in the most snappish voice possible], by
that austere female, What he was thinking about?

"You," [in the gentlest childlike voice] said Paul, without the least
reserve.

"And what are you t