inevitably misjudge him. _Mais c'est mon homme_, one may say,
as La Fontaine said of Moliere. Of modern writers, putting Scott aside,
he is to me the most friendly and sympathetic. Great genius as he was,
he was also a penman, a journalist; and journalists and penmen will
always look to him as their big brother, the man in their own line of
whom they are proudest. As devout Catholics did not always worship the
greatest saints, but the friendliest saints, their own, so we scribes
burn our cheap incense to St. William Makepeace. He could do all that
any of us could do, and he did it infinitely better. A piece of verse
for _Punch_, a paragraph, a caricature, were not beneath the dignity of
the author of "Esmond." He had the kindness and helpfulness which I, for
one, have never met a journalist who lacked. He was a good Englishman;
the boy within him never died; he loved children, and boys, and a little
slang, and a boxing match. If he had failings, who knew them better than
he? How often he is at once the boy at the swishing block and Dr. Birch
who does not spare the rod! Let us believe with that beloved physician,
our old friend Dr. John Brown, that "Mr. Thackeray was much greater, much
nobler than his works, great and noble as they are." Let us part with
him, remembering his own words:

"Come wealth or want, come good or ill,
Let young and old accept their part,
And bow before the awful Will,
And bear it with an honest heart."

DICKENS

"I cannot read Dickens!" How many people make this confession, with a
front of brass, and do not seem to know how poor a figure they cut!
George Eliot says that a difference of taste in jokes is a great cause of
domestic discomfort. A difference of taste in books, when it is decided
and vigorous, breaks many a possible friendship, and nips many a young
liking in the bud. I would not willingly seem intolerant. A man may not
like Sophocles, may speak disrespectfully of Virgil, and even sneer at
Herodotus, and yet may be endured. But he or she (it is usually she) who
contemns Scott, and "cannot read Dickens," is a person with whom I would
fain have no further converse. If she be a lady, and if one meets her at
dinner, she must of course be borne with, and "suffered gladly." But she
has dug a gulf that nothing can bridge; she may be fair, clever and
popular, but she is Anathema. I feel towards her (or him if he wears a
beard) as Bucklaw did tow