saying to you some time
ago how curious I thought it that _Robinson Crusoe_ should be the only
instance of an universally popular book that could make no one laugh and
could make no one cry. I have been reading it again just now, in the
course of my numerous refreshings at those English wells, and I will
venture to say that there is not in literature a more surprising
instance of an utter want of tenderness and sentiment, than the death of
Friday. It is as heartless as _Gil Blas_, in a very different and far
more serious way. But the second part altogether will not bear enquiry.
In the second part of _Don Quixote_ are some of the finest things. But
the second part of _Robinson Crusoe_ is perfectly contemptible, in the
glaring defect that it exhibits the man who was 30 years on that desert
island with no visible effect made on his character by that experience.
De Foe's women too--Robinson Crusoe's wife for instance--are terrible
dull commonplace fellows without breeches; and I have no doubt he was a
precious dry and disagreeable article himself--I mean De Foe: not
Robinson. Poor dear Goldsmith (I remember as I write) derived the same
impression."

[202] When in Paris six years later Dickens saw this fine singer in an
opera by Gluck, and the reader will not be sorry to have his description
of it. "Last night I saw Madame Viardot do Gluck's Orphee. It is a most
extraordinary performance--pathetic in the highest degree, and full of
quite sublime acting. Though it is unapproachably fine from first to
last, the beginning of it, at the tomb of Eurydice, is a thing that I
cannot remember at this moment of writing, without emotion. It is the
finest presentation of grief that I can imagine. And when she has
received hope from the Gods, and encouragement to go into the other
world and seek Eurydice, Viardot's manner of taking the relinquished
lyre from the tomb and becoming radiant again, is most noble. Also she
recognizes Eurydice's touch, when at length the hand is put in hers from
behind, like a most transcendant genius. And when, yielding to
Eurydice's entreaties she has turned round and slain her with a look,
her despair over the body is grand in the extreme. It is worth a journey
to Paris to see, for there is no such Art to be otherwise looked upon.
Her husband stumbled over me by mere chance, and took me to her
dressing-room. Nothing could have happened better as a genuine homage to
the performance, for I was disfigured wi