of little Paul, and when the lad dies one quite feels that the light has gone out of the book.  “David Copperfield” shorn of David’s childhood and youth would be a far less admirable performance.  The hero of “Oliver Twist” is a boy.  Pip is a boy through a fair portion of “Great Expectations.”  The heroine of “The Old Curiosity Shop” is, as I have just said, a girl.  And of all these children, the one who seems, from the first, to have stood highest in popular favour, and won most hearts, is Little Nell.  Ay me, what tears have been shed over her weary wanderings with that absurd old gambling grandfather of hers; how many persons have sorrowed over her untimely end as if she had been a daughter or a sister.  High and low, literate and illiterate, over nearly all has she cast her spell.  Hood, he who sang the “Song of the Shirt,” paid her the tribute of his admiration, and Jeffrey, the hard-headed old judge and editor of The Edinburgh Review, the tribute of his tears.  Landor volleyed forth his thunderous praises over her grave, likening her to Juliet and Desdemona.  Nay, Dickens himself sadly bewailed her fate, described himself as being the “wretchedest of the wretched” when it drew near, and shut himself from all society as if he had suffered a real bereavement.  While as to the feeling which she has excited in the breasts of the illiterate, we may take Mr. Bret Harte’s account of the haggard golddiggers by the roaring Californian camp fire, who throw down their cards to listen to her story, and, for the nonce, are softened and humanized.[14]—­Such is the sympathy she has created.  And for the description of her death and burial, as a superb piece of pathetic writing, there has been a perfect chorus of praise broken here and there no doubt by a discordant voice, but still of the loudest and most heartfelt.  Did not Horne, a poet better known to the last generation than to this, point out that though printed as prose, these passages were, perhaps as “the result of harmonious accident,” essentially poetry, and “written in blank verse of irregular metres and rhythms, which Southey and Shelley and some other poets have occasionally adopted”?  Did he not print part of the passages in this form, substituting only, as a concession to the conventionalities of verse, the word “grandames” for “grandmothers”; and did he not declare of one of the extracts so printed that it was “worthy of the best passages in Wordsworth”?

If it “argues an insensibility” to stand somewhat unmoved among all these tears and admiration, I am afraid I must be rather pebble-hearted.  To tell the whole damaging truth, I am, and always have been, only slightly affected by the story of Little Nell; have never felt any particular inclination to shed a tear over it, and consider the closing chapters as failing of their due effect, on me at least, because they are pitched in a key that is altogether too high and unnatural.  Of course one makes a confession of this kind with diffidence.  It is no light