danger and sorrow with unflinching courage, and never bringing his tears
to market. Dickens somewhere says, characteristically, that 'Robinson
Crusoe' is the only very popular work which can be read without a tear
from the first page to the last. That is precisely the quality which
commends it to this stern reader, who thought that in fiction as in life
a man should keep his feelings under lock and key. In spite of his
rather peculiar canons of taste, Fitzjames was profoundly interested,
even in spite of himself, in some novels constructed on very different
principles. In these early articles he falls foul of 'Mdme. de
Bovary,'[69] from the point of view of the simple-minded moralist, but
he heartily admires Balzac, whom he defends against a similar charge,
and in whose records of imaginary criminals--records not so famous in
England at that time as they now are--he found an interest almost equal
to that of the 'State Trials' and Palmer's case. He could also, I must
add, enjoy Dickens's humour as heartily as any one. He was well up in
'Pickwick,' though I don't know whether he would have been equal to
Calverley's famous examination-paper, and he had a special liking for
the 'Uncommercial Traveller.' But when Dickens deserted his proper
function Fitzjames was roused to indignation. The 'little Nell'
sentimentalism and the long gallery of melodramatic deathbeds disgusted
him, while the assaults upon the governing classes generally stirred his
wrath. The satire upon individuals may be all very well in its place,
but a man, he said, has no business to set up as the 'regenerator of
society' because he is its most 'distinguished buffoon.' He was not
picking his words, and 'buffoon' is certainly an injudicious phrase; but
the sentiment which it expressed was so characteristic and deeply rooted
that I must dwell a little upon its manifestation at this time.

The war between the Saturday reviewers and their antagonists was carried
on with a frequent use of the nicknames 'prig' and 'cynic' upon one
side, and 'buffoon' and 'sentimentalist' upon the other. Phrases so
employed soon lose all definite meaning, but it is, I think, easy to see
what they meant as applied either by or to Fitzjames. The 'comic
writers' for him were exponents of the petty and vulgar ideals of the
lower middle classes of the day. The world of Dickens's novels was a
portrait of the class for which Dickens wrote. It was a world of smug
little tradesmen of sha