"Oh, indeed! so that's your opinion, Lorton?" put in Mr Mawley, as antagonistic as ever. "So that's your opinion, is it? I _will_ do as you say, and take it for what it is worth--that is, keep my own still! You may be very sharp and clever, and all that sort of thing, my dear fellow; but I don't see the difference between the two that you have so lucidly pointed out. Satire and cynicism are co-equal terms to my mind: your argument won't persuade me, Lorton, although I must say that you are absolutely brilliant to-day. You should really start a school of Modern Literature, my dear fellow, and set up as a professor of the same!" "Please get my scissors, Frank," said Miss Pimpernell, trying to stop our wordy warfare. I got them; but I had my return blow at the curate all the same. "I suppose you'd be one of my first pupils, Mr Mawley," I said. "I think I could coach you up a little!" He was going to crush me with some of his sledge-hammer declamation, being thoroughly roused, when Bessie Dasher averted the storm, by entering the arena and changing the conversation to a broader footing. "How I dote on Thackeray!" she exclaimed with all her natural impulsiveness. "What a dear, delicious creature Becky Sharp is; and that funny old baronet, Sir Pitt something or other, too! When I first took up _Vanity Fair_ I could not let it out of my hands until I finished it." "That's more than I can say," said the curate. "I don't like Thackeray. He cuts up every one and everything. Is not that a cynic for you?" "Not everybody," said Min--I cannot call her anything else now--coming to my assistance, "not everybody, Mr Mawley. I think Thackeray, with all his satire and kindly laughter in his sleeve at persons that ought to be laughed down, has yet given us some of the most pathetic touches of human nature existing in English literature. There's the old colonel in _The Newcomes_, for instance. That little bit about his teaching his tiny grandson to say his prayers, before he put him into bed in his poor chamber in the Charter House, to which he was reduced, would make any one cry. And Henry Esmond, and Warrington, and Laura--where would you find more nobly-drawn characters than those?" and she stopped, out of breath with her defence of one of the greatest writers we have ever had, indignant, with such a pretty indignation, at his merits being questioned for a moment. "Of course I must bow to your decision, Miss Clyde," said the curate, with one of those stock ceremonial bows that stood him in such good stead amongst the female community of the parish. He was a cunning fellow, Mawley. Knew which way his interest lay; and never went against the ladies if he could help it. "But," he continued, "if we talk of pathos, there's `the great master of fiction,' Dickens; who can come up to him?" "Ah, yes! Mr Mawley,"--chorused the majority of the girls--"we quite agree with you: there's nobody like Dickens!"