st sincere admirers. But about matter
of this kind, and the unsealing of the fountains of tears, who can
argue? Where is taste? where is truth? What tears are 'manly, Sir,
manly,' as Fred Bayham has it; and of what lamentations ought we rather
to be ashamed? _Sunt lacrymae rerum_; one has been moved in the cell
where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or by the river-banks where Syracusan
arrows slew the parched Athenians among the mire and blood; or, in
fiction, when Colonel Newcome said _Adsum_, or over the diary of Clare
Doria Forey, or where Aramis laments, with strange tears, the death
of Porthos. But over Dombey (the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to
snivel.

When an author deliberately sits down and says, 'Now, let us have a good
cry,' he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in many
breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of 'Dombey and Son' there is little
we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots; just as we forget
the melodramatics of 'Martin Chuzzlewit.' I have read in that book a
score of times; I never see it but I revel in it--in Pecksniff, and Mrs.
Gamp, and the Americans. But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did,
what Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the pictures with
plenty of shading illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend. In
the same way, one of your most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in
the licence of private conversation) that 'Ralph Nickleby and Monk are
too steep;' and probably a cultivated taste will always find them a
little precipitous.

'Too steep:'--the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius,
carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its
grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press
fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that
was the failing which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little:
when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy thought the seedsman 'a very
happy man to have so many little drawers in his shop.' The reflection
is thoroughly boyish; but then you add, 'I wondered whether the
flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those
jails and bloom.' That is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven,
jaded literary fancy at work.

'So we arraign her; but she,' the Genius of Charles Dickens, how
brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain of
laughter imperishable; though there is something of