The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for ever and a day. Honest old Laughter, the true _lutin_ of your inspiration, must have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though it is true that the taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed after your favourite fashion (“Great Expectations” and the “Tale of Two Cities” are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted. Were people simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is concerned, a generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-headed shallow critic, who declared that Wordsworth “would never do,” cried, “wept like anything,” over your Little Nell. One still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller; but who can cry over Little Nell? Ah, Sir, how could you—who knew so intimately, who remembered so strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood—how could you “wallow naked in the pathetic,” and massacre holocausts of the Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a child’s death-bed, was it worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved. She was more than usual calm, She did not give a single dam, wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over your Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual calm; and probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. But about matter of this kind, and the unseating 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 lacrymæ 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 says _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.