the fairest gifts combined? If we may not call you a poet (for the first of
English writers of light verse did not seek that crown), who that was less
than a poet ever saw life with a glance so keen as yours, so steady, and so
sane? Your pathos was never cheap, your laughter never forced; your sigh was
never the pulpit trick of the preacher. Your funny people--your Costigans and
Fokers--were not mere characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic
masks. Behind each the human heart was beating; and ever and again we were
allowed to see the features of the man.

Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like another, but a
constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a repeated echo of its
laughter and its complaint. Others have written, and not written badly, with
the stolid professional regularity of the clerk at his desk; you, like the
Scholar Gipsy, might have said that 'it needs heaven-sent moments for this
skill.' There are, it will not surprise you, some honourable women and a few
men who call you a cynic; who speak of 'the withered world of Thackerayan
satire;' who think your eyes were ever turned to the sordid aspects of
life--to the mother-in-law who threatens to 'take away her silver bread-
basket;' to the intriguer, the sneak, the termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes
Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of this world. The quarrel of these
sentimentalists is really with life, not with you; they might as wisely blame
Monsieur Buffon because there are snakes in his Natural History. Had you not
impaled certain noxious human insects, you would have better pleased Mr.
Ruskin; had you confined yourself to such performances, you would have been
more dear to the Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.

You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a doll, but the
ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either of Lady Castlewood or of
Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can pardon you Becky Sharp and Blanche
Amory; they find it harder to forgive you Emmy Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet