sadness must always be present when we see a human creature imperfectly gifted with man’s noblest attribute of reason.  But, granting this to the full, is it possible to conceive of anything more kindly and gentle in the delineation of partial insanity than the portraits which the French critic finds horrible?  Barnaby Rudge’s lunatic symptoms are compatible with the keenest enjoyment of nature’s sights and sounds, fresh air and free sunlight, and compatible with loyalty and high courage.  Many men might profitably change their reason for his unreason.  Mr. Dick’s flightiness is allied to an intense devotion and gratitude to the woman who had rescued him from confinement in an asylum; there lives a world of kindly sentiments in his poor bewildered brains.  Of Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper says truly, “he may not be a Solomon, nor do I say he is, but this I do say, a less selfish human creature human nature never knew.”  And to this one may add that he is entirely high-minded, generous, and honourable.  Miss Flite’s crazes do not prevent her from being full of all womanly sympathies.  Here I think lies the charm these characters had for Dickens.  As he was fond of showing a soul of goodness in the ill-favoured and uncouth, so he liked to make men feel that even in a disordered intellect all kindly virtues might find a home, and a happy one.  M. Taine may call this “horrible” if he likes.  I think myself it would be possible to find a better adjective.

Dickens was at work on “Dombey and Son” during the latter part of the year 1846, and the whole of 1847, and the early part of 1848.  We left him on the 16th of November, in the first of these years, starting from Lausanne for Paris, which he reached on the evening of the 20th.  Here he took a house—­a “preposterous” house, according to his own account, with only gleams of reason in it; and visited many theatres; and went very often to the Morgue, where lie the unowned dead; and had pleasant friendly intercourse with the notable French authors of the time, Alexandre Dumas the Great, most prolific of romance writers; and Scribe of the innumerable plays; and the poets Lamartine and Victor Hugo; and Chateaubriand, then in his sad and somewhat morose old age.  And in Paris too, with the help of streets and crowded ways, he wrote the great number of Dombey, the number in which little Paul dies.  Three months did Dickens spend in the French capital, the incomparable city, and then was back in London, at the old life of hard work; but with even a stronger infusion than before of private theatricals—­private theatricals on a grandiose scale, that were applauded by the Queen herself, and took him and his troupe starring about during the next three or four years, hither and thither, and here and there, in London and the provinces.  “Splendid strolling” Forster calls it; and a period of unmixed jollity and enjoyment it seems to have been.  Of course Dickens was the life and soul of it all.  Mrs. Cowden Clarke, one of the