out, or off, into the apostrophe: “Ah, judges of Amontillado sherry; crushers of walnuts with silver crackers; connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow seal; gay riders in padded chariots; proud cavaliers of blood-horses,—you don’t know how painfully and slowly, almost agonisingly, the poor have to scrape and save, and deny themselves the necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare.” Lord Jeffrey eagerly asserted the even painful interest with which one of Mr. Dickens’s Christmas books affected him: “sanative, I dare say, to the spirit, but making us despise and loathe ourselves for passing our days in luxury, while better and gentler creatures are living such lives as make us wonder that such things can be in a society of human beings, or even in the world of a good God.” Lord Lytton has compared the stray glimpses one gets of want and misery, to looking through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water, when the gazer wonders how things so terrible have hitherto been unknown to him: “Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of your patent conscience ... you are startled and dismayed” at the sight: you say within yourself, “Can such things be? I never dreamed of this before! I thought what was invisible to me was non-existent in itself—I will remember this dread experiment.” The like is the moral of Hood’s poem of the Lady’s Dream. From grief exempt, she had never dreamt of such a world of woe as appals her in apocalyptic visions of the night; never dreamt till now of the hearts that daily break, and the tears that hourly fall, and the many, many troubles of life that grieve this earthly ball—disease, and hunger, and pain, and want; but now she dreams of them all—of the naked she might have clad, the famished she might have fed, the sorrowing she might have solaced; of each pleading that, long ago, she scanned with a heedless eye. “I drank the richest draughts; And ate whatever is good— Fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit Supplied my hungry mood; But I never remembered the wretched ones That starve for want of food. I dressed as the noble dress, In cloth of silver and gold, With silk, and satin, and costly furs, In many an ample fold; But I never remembered the naked limbs That froze with winter’s cold. The wounds I might have healed! The human sorrow and smart! And yet it never was in my soul To play so ill a part But evil is wrought by want of Thought [So Lear’s “O, I have ta’en _too little thought_ of this!”] As well as want of Heart! She clasped her fervent hands, And the tears began to stream; Large, and bitter, and fast they fell, Remorse was so extreme, And yet, O yet, that many a dame Would dream the Lady’s Dream!”