How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour.  Is there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from consideration of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty?  A hundred years ago, eighty years ago —­nay, fifty years ago—­we were a cruel but also a humorous people.  We had bull-baitings, and badger-drawings, and hustings, and prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went to see men hanged; the pillory and the stocks were no empty ‘terrors unto evil-doers,’ for there was commonly a malefactor occupying each of these institutions.  With all this we had a broad blown comic sense.  We had Ho-garth, and Bunbury, and George Cruikshank, and Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees, and the creator of Tittlebat Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the ‘Noctes,’ and, above all, we had you.

From the old giants of English fun—­burly persons delighting in broad caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing blows at the more prominent and obvious human follies—­from these you derived the splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your earlier works.  Mr. Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all the Pickwickians, and Mr. Dowler, and John Browdie—­these and their immortal companions were reared, so to speak, on the beef and beer of that naughty, fox-hunting, badger-baiting old England, which we have improved out of existence.  And these characters, assuredly, are your best; by them, though stupid people cannot read about them, you will live while there is a laugh left among us.  Perhaps that does not assure you a very prolonged existence, but only the future can show.

The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for ever and a day.  Honest old Laughter, the true lutin of your inspiration, must have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though it is true that the taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed after your favourite fashion (’Great Expectations’ and the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted.  Were people simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is concerned, a generation ago?  Jeffrey, the hard-headed shallow critic, who declared that Wordsworth ‘would never do,’ cried, ’wept like anything,’ over your Little Nell.  One still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller; but who can cry over Little Nell?

Ah, Sir, how could you—­who knew so intimately, who remembered so strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood—­how could you ‘wallow naked in the pathetic,’ and massacre holocausts of the Innocents?  To draw tears by gloating over a child’s death-bed, was it worthy of you?  Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should melt?  I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved.

  She was more than usual calm,
  She did not give a single dam,