a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a serious comment on
anything which others consider or have considered humorous is to put
oneself at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat
the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought it
worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least tolerable of
modern reproaches--that he lacks humour; but he need not always care. Now
to turn over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the
mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the _arriere
boutique_. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature.
Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a
circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essential
vulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some old "Punch" volume a
drawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing named the gentle, the
refined--where the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of the
letterpress. Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech of
her stays. They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross. And
page by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her
foolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that time
there was, moreover, one great humourist, one whom I infinitely admire;
he, too, I am grieved to remember, bore his part willingly in vulgarizing
the woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarizing of the act
of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing man at the law for evading her
fatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandoned without
restraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibility--in none of
these ignominies is woman so common and so foolish for Dickens as she is
in child-bearing.

I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, Dickens's
contemporary. And accordingly the married woman and her child are
humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she is