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 said _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; just as we forget the melodramatics
of 'Martin Chuzzlewit.' I have read in that book a score of times; I never see
it but I revel in it--in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and the Americans. But what
the plot is all about, what Jonas did, what Montagu Tigg had to make in the
matter, what all the pictures with plenty of shading illustrate, I have never
been able to comprehend. In the same way, one of your most thorough-going
admirers has allowed (in the licence of private conversation) that 'Ralph
Nickleby and Monk are too steep;' and probably a cultivated taste will always
find them a little precipitous.

'Too steep:'--the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius, carried
above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque and in its
gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too hard, to deepen
the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the failing which proved you
mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the
boy thought the seedsman 'a very happy man to have so many little drawers in
his shop.' The reflection is thoroughly boyish; but then you add, 'I wondered
whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of
those jails and bloom.' That is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven,
jaded literary fancy at work.