But the pupils — the young noblemen! Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear the stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together. There was every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering. There was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!—From DICKENS’S _Nicholas Nickleby_. VI It is not only his nerves which are sensitive, it is also his heart, and the keenness of his sensations is equalled by that of his sympathies. He is interested in his characters, and it is by loving them that he makes us love them. If the figures he paints give us a life-like impression, it is because they lived not only in his imagination but also in his heart.… Daudet can feel in his heart that love which Dickens felt towards those who are ill-favoured or poor. His favourite heroes are especially those who are sensitive, and who are made wretched by their sensitiveness. In order to create _Jack_ he left the _Nabab_, which he had already begun, and wrote in less than a year that book which is at the same time tender and cruel, but in which cruelty is only another form of tenderness, and which so oppressed the heart of George Sand that after reading it she, the indefatigable worker, remained for three whole days without being able to produce anything at all.—From PELLISSIER, _Le Mouvement littéraire au XIXe siècle_. VII