[Footnote 1:  Surely it was not so meant, for instance, in the passage about the desobligeante, which had been “standing so many months unpitied in the corner of Monsieur Dessien’s coach-yard.  Much, indeed, was not to be said for it, but something might; and, when a few words will rescue Misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them.”  “Does anybody,” asks Thackeray in a strangely matter-of-fact fashion, “believe that this is a real sentiment?  That this luxury of generosity, this gallant rescue of Misery—­out of an old cab—­is genuine feeling?” Nobody, we should say.  But, on the other hand, does anybody—­or did anybody before Thackeray—­suggest that it was meant to pass for genuine feeling?  Is it not an obvious piece of mock pathetic?]

In one famous case, indeed, the failure can hardly be described as other than ludicrous.  The figure of the distraught Maria of Moulines is tenderly drawn; the accessories of the picture—­her goat, her dog, her pipe, her song to the Virgin—­though a little theatrical, perhaps, are skilfully touched in; and so long as the Sentimental Traveller keeps our attention fixed upon her and them the scene prospers well enough.  But, after having bidden us duly note how “the tears trickled down her cheeks,” the Traveller continues:  “I sat down close by her, and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief.  I then steeped it in my own—­and then in hers—­and then in mine—­and then I wiped hers again; and as I did it I felt such undescribable emotions within me as, I am sure, could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion.”  The reader of this may well ask himself in wonderment whether he is really expected to make a third in the lachrymose group.  We look at the passage again, and more carefully, to see if, after all, we may not be intended to laugh, and not to cry at it; but on finding, as clearly appears, that we actually are intended to cry at it the temptation to laugh becomes almost irresistible.  We proceed, however, to the account of Maria’s wanderings to Rome and back, and we come to the pretty passage which follows: 

“How she had borne it, and how she had got supported, she could not tell; but God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb.  Shorn indeed! and to the quick, said I; and wast thou in my own land, where I have a cottage, I would take thee to it, and shelter thee; thou shouldst eat of my own bread and drink of my own cup; I would be kind to thy Sylvio; in all thy weaknesses and wanderings I would seek after thee, and bring thee back.  When the sun went down I would say my prayers; and when I had done thou shouldst play thy evening-song upon thy pipe; nor would the incense of my sacrifice be worse accepted for entering heaven along with that of a broken heart.”

But then follows more whimpering: