Yet it does touch most of us somehow. I know I always feel divided between laughter and enthusiastic sympathy even still, when I see it for the hundred and fiftieth time or so. In the same way, when Paul Clifford charges on society the crimes of his outlaw career; when Rienzi vows vengeance for his brother's blood; when Zanoni resigns his immortal youth that "the flower at his feet may a little longer drink the dew"; when Ernest Maltravers silently laments amid all his splendor of success the obscure Arcadia of his boyish love, we can all see at a glance how bombastic, gaudy, melodramatic, is the style in which the author works out his ideas; how utterly unlike the simple, strong majesty of true art the whole thing is; but yet we must acknowledge that the author understands thoroughly how to touch a certain vein of what may be called elementary emotion, common almost to all minds, which it is the object of society to repress or suppress, and the object of the popular artist to stir up into activity. Preach, advise, remonstrate, demonstrate as you will, the majority of us will always feel inclined to give alms to beggar-women and whining little children in the snowy streets. We know we are doing unwisely, and perhaps even wrongly; we know that the misery which touches us is probably a trumped-up and sham misery; we know that whatever we give to the undeserving and the insincere is practically withdrawn from the deserving and the sincere; we are ashamed to be seen giving the money, and yet we do give it whenever we can. Because, after all, our common emotion of sympathy with the more obvious, intelligible, and I would almost say vulgar forms of human suffering, are far too strong for our moderating maxims and our more refined mental conditions. So of the sympathies which heroes and heroines, aspirations and agonies of the style of Bulwer-Lytton awaken in us. Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish it; and is not he something of an artist who recognizes this great fact in human nature, and plays upon that vibrating, imperishable chord, and compels it to give him back such an applauding echo? After all, I think there is just as much of sham and of Madame Tussaud, and of the beggar-child in the snow, about Paul Dombey's deathbed and Little Dorrit's filial devotion, as about the mock heroics of Claude Melnotte or the domestic virtues of the Caxtons. Of course I am not comparing Bulwer-Lytton with Dickens. The latter was a man of genius, and one of the greatest humorists known at least to modern literature. But nearly all the pathetic side of Dickens seems to me of much the same origin as the heroic side of Bulwer-Lytton, and I question whether the greater part of the popularity won by the author of "Bleak House" has not been gained by a mastery of the very same kind of art as that which sets galleries applauding for Claude Melnotte, and young women in tears for Eugene Aram.