hat a
place to hold in the affections of men! What an awful responsibility
hanging over a writer!" And so on, Thackeray saying all this! Thackeray
speaking thus in ejaculatory sentences indicative of his gratitude
and of his admiration! Passages that to men like William Thackeray and
Francis Jeffrey were expressive only of inimitable tenderness, might be
read dry-eyed by less keen appreciators, from the printed page, might
even be ludicrously depreciated by them as mere mawkish sentimentality.
But, even among these, there was hardly one who could hear those very
passages read by Dickens himself without recognising at last, what had
hitherto remained unperceived and unsuspected, the gracious and
pathetic beauty animating every thought and every word in the original
descriptions. Equally, it may be said, in the delineation of terror and
of pathos, in the murder-scene from Oliver Twist, and in the death-scene
of little Dombey, the novelist-reader attained success by the simple
fact of his never once exaggerating.

It has been well remarked by an eminent authority upon the art of
elocution, whose opinions have been already quoted in these pages, to
wit, John Ireland, that "There is a point to which the passions must
be raised to display that exhibition of them which scatters contagious
tenderness through the whole theatre, but carried, though but the
breadth of a hair, beyond that point, the picture becomes an overcharged
caricature, as likely to create laughter as diffuse distress." Never,
perhaps, has that subtle boundary-line been hit with more admirable
dexterity, just within the hair's breadth here indicated, than it was,
for example, in Macready's impersonation of Virginius, where his scream
in the camp-scene betrayed his instantaneous appreciation of the
wrong meditated by Appius Claudius against the virginal purity of his
daughter. As adroitly, in his way, as that great master of his
craft, who was for so many years among his most cherished friends and
intimates, Dickens kept within the indicated lines of demarcation,
beyond which no impersonator, whether upon the stage or upon the
platform, can ever pass for a single instant with impunity.

Speaking of Munden, in one of the most charming of his Essays, Charles
Lamb has said, "I have seen him diffuse a glow of sentiment which has
made the pulse of a crowded house beat like that of one man; when he has
come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a pe