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,


wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over
your Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual
calm; and probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers.
But about matter of this kind, and the unseating of the fountains of
tears, who can argue? Where is taste? where is truth? What tears
are "manly, Sir, manly," as Fred Bayham has it; and of what
lamentations ought we rather to be ashamed? Sunt lacrymae rerum;
one has been moved in the cell where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or
by the river-banks where Syracusan arrows slew the parched Athenians
among the mire and blood; or, in fiction, when Colonel Newcome says
Adsum, or over the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or where Aramis
laments, with strange tears, the death of Porthos. But over Dombey
(the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel.

When an author deliberately sits down and says, "Now, let us have a
good cry," he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least
in many breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of "Dombey and Son"
there is little we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots;