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,

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 unsealing 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