to look up the street.  Well, replied I, we’ll wait a minute for thy driver.  He turned his head thoughtfully about, and looked wistfully the opposite way.  I understand thee perfectly, answered I:  if thou takest a wrong step in this affair he will cudgel thee to death.  Well, a minute is but a minute, and if it saves a fellow-creature a drubbing, it shall not be set down as ill spent.  He was eating the stem of an artichoke as this discourse went on, and, in the little peevish contentions of nature betwixt hunger and unsavouriness, had dropped it out of his mouth half a dozen times, and picked it up again.  God help thee, Jack! said I, thou hast a bitter breakfast on’t, and many a bitter blow, I fear, for its wages—­’tis all, all bitterness to thee, whatever life is to others.  And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is as bitter, I dare say, as soot (for he had cast aside the stem), and thou hast not a friend, perhaps, in all this world that will give thee a macaroon.  In saying this I pulled out a paper of ’em, which I had just purchased, and gave him one; and, at this moment that I am telling it, my heart smites me that there was more of pleasantry in the conceit of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon, than of benevolence in giving him one, which presided in the act.  When the ass had eaten his macaroon I pressed him to come in.  The poor beast was heavy loaded, his legs seemed to tremble under him, he hung rather backwards, and as I pulled at his halter it broke short in my hand.  He looked up pensive in my face.  ’Don’t thrash me with it; but if you will, you may.’  ‘If I do,’ said I, ‘I’ll be d——­d.’”

Well might Thackeray say of this passage that, “the critic who refuses to see in it wit, humour, pathos, a kind nature speaking, and a real sentiment, must be hard indeed to move and to please.”  It is, in truth, excellent; and its excellence is due to its possessing nearly every one of those qualities, positive and negative, which the two other scenes above quoted are without.  The author does not here obtrude himself, does not importune us to admire his exquisitely compassionate nature; on the contrary, he at once amuses us and enlists our sympathies by that subtly humorous piece of self-analysis, in which he shows how large an admixture of curiosity was contained in his benevolence.  The incident, too, is well chosen.  No forced concurrence of circumstances brings it about:  it is such as any man might have met with anywhere in his travels, and it is handled in a simple and manly fashion.  The reader is with the writer throughout; and their common mood of half-humorous pity is sustained, unforced, but unbroken, from first to last.