And you, sweet Dora, let me confess I love you, though sensible friends deem you foolish. Ah, silly Dora, fashioned by wise Mother Nature who knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not unduly about the oysters and the underdone mutton, little woman. Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us. Your work is to teach us gentleness and kindness. Lay your foolish curls just here, child. It is from such as you we learn wisdom. Foolish wise folk sneer at you. Foolish wise folk would pull up the laughing lilies, the needless roses from the garden, would plant in their places only useful, wholesome cabbage. But the gardener, knowing better, plants the silly, short-lived flowers, foolish wise folk asking for what purpose. Gallant Traddles, of the strong heart and the unruly hair; Sophy, dearest of girls; Betsy Trotwood, with your gentlemanly manners and your woman’s heart, you have come to me in shabby rooms, making the dismal place seem bright. In dark hours your kindly faces have looked out at me from the shadows, your kindly voices have cheered me. Little Em’ly and Agnes, it may be my bad taste, but I cannot share my friend Dickens’ enthusiasm for them. Dickens’ good women are all too good for human nature’s daily food. Esther Summerson, Florence Dombey, Little Nell—you have no faults to love you by. Scott’s women were likewise mere illuminated texts. Scott only drew one live heroine—Catherine Seton. His other women were merely the prizes the hero had to win in the end, like the sucking pig or the leg of mutton for which the yokel climbs the greasy pole. That Dickens could draw a woman to some likeness he proved by Bella Wilfer, and Estella in “Great Expectations.” But real women have never been popular in fiction. Men readers prefer the false, and women readers object to the truth. From an artistic point of view, “David Copperfield” is undoubtedly Dickens’ best work. Its humour is less boisterous; its pathos less highly coloured. One of Leech’s pictures represents a cab-man calmly sleeping in the gutter. “Oh, poor dear, he’s ill,” says a tender-hearted lady in the crowd. “Ill!” retorts a male bystander indignantly, “Ill! ’E’s ’ad too much of what I ain’t ’ad enough of.”