aughed then.
Oh, the delight of Mr. Crummles's description of his wife's dignified
manner of standing with her head on a spear!

The tragedy in "Nicholas Nickleby" never appealed to me. It was
necessary to skip that. When the people were gentlemanly and ladylike,
they became great bores. But what young reader of Dickens can forget the
hostile attitude of Mr. Lillyvick, great-uncle of the little Miss
Kenwigses, when Nicholas attempted to teach them French? As one grows
older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda give one less real delight; but think
of the first discovery of them, and it is like Balboa's--or was it
Cortez's?--discovery of the Pacific in Keats's sonnet. "Nicholas
Nickleby" was read over and over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found
"Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two
Cities" seemed to be rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enough
for my taste, yet better than anything else that anybody had written. My
later impressions of Dickens modified these instinctive intuitions.

One day, a set of Thackeray arrived, little green volumes, as I
remember, and I began to read "Vanity Fair." My mother seized it and
read it aloud again. Her confessor had told her that a dislike for good
novels was "Puritan" and she, shocked by the implied reproach, took
again to novel reading. I am afraid that I disliked Colonel Dobbin and
Amelia very much. Becky Sharp pleased me beyond words; I don't think
that the morality of the case affected my point of view at all. I was
delighted whenever Becky "downed" an enemy. They were such a lot of
stupid people--the enemies--and I reflected during the course of the
story that, after all, Thackeray had said that poor Becky had no mother
to guide her footsteps. When the Marquis of Steyne was hit on the
forehead with the diamonds, I thought it served him right; but I was
unhappy because poor Becky had lost the jewels. In finishing the book
with those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my mother said severely, "That
is what always happens to bad people!" But in my heart I did not believe
that Becky Sharp was a bad person at all.

For a time I returned to Dickens, to "Nicholas Nickleby," to "David
Copperfield." I respected Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way that
I could not explain. But Dickens I loved. Later--it was on one June
afternoon I think--when the news of Dickens's death arrived, it seemed
to me that for a while all delight in life had ended.

One of