to
communicate to the public his own unhesitating belief." What, however,
is the public? Mr Lewes goes on to relate. "Give a child a wooden horse,
with hair for mane and tail, and wafer-spots for colouring, he will
never be disturbed by the fact that this horse does not move its legs
but runs on wheels; and this wooden horse, which he can handle and draw,
is believed in more than a pictured horse by a Wouvermanns or an
Ansdell(!!) It may be said of Dickens's human figures that they too are
wooden, and run on wheels; but these are details which scarcely disturb
the belief of admirers. Just as the wooden horse is brought within the
range of the child's emotions, and dramatizing tendencies, when he can
handle and draw it, so Dickens's figures are brought within the range of
the reader's interests, and receive from these interests a sudden
illumination, when they are the puppets of a drama every incident of
which appeals to the sympathies."

_Risum teneatis?_ But the smile is grim that rises to the face of one to
whom the relations of the writer and his critic, while both writer and
critic lived, are known; and who sees the drift of now scattering such
rubbish as this over an established fame. As it fares with the
imagination that is imperial, so with the drama every incident of which
appeals to the sympathies. The one being explained by hallucination, and
the other by the wooden horse, plenty of fine words are to spare by
which contempt may receive the show of candour. When the characters in a
play are puppets, and the audiences of the theatre fools or children, no
wise man forfeits his wisdom by proceeding to admit that the successful
playwright, "with a fine felicity of instinct," seized upon situations,
for his wooden figures, having "irresistible hold over the domestic
affections;" that, through his puppets, he spoke "in the mother-tongue
of the heart;" that, with his spotted horses and so forth, he "painted
the life he knew and everyone knew;" that he painted, of course, nothing
ideal or heroic, and that the world of thought and passion lay beyond
his horizon; but that, with his artificial performers and his
feeble-witted audiences, "all the resources of the bourgeois epic were
in his grasp; the joys and pains of childhood, the petty tyrannies of
ignoble natures, the genial pleasantries of happy natures, the life of
the poor, the struggles of the street and back parlour, the insolence of
office, the sharp social cont