[16] But once admit that feeling is legitimate;
once allow that tears are due to those who have been crushed and left
bleeding by this great world of ours as it crashes blundering on its
way; once grant that the writer's art can properly embrace what
Shakespeare calls "the pity of it," the sorrows inwoven in all our
human relationships; once acknowledge all this, and then I affirm,
most confidently, that Dickens, working at his best, was one of the
greatest masters of pathos who ever lived. I can myself see scarce a
strained discordant note in the account of the short life and early
death of Paul Dombey, and none in the description of the death of Paul
Dombey's mother, or in the story of Tiny Tim, or in the record of
David Copperfield's childhood and boyhood. I consider the passage in
"American Notes" describing the traits of gentle kindliness among the
emigrants as being nobly, pathetically eloquent. Did space allow, I
could support my position by quotations and example to any extent. And
my conclusion is that, though he failed with Little Nell, yet he
succeeded elsewhere, and superbly.

The number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_, containing the conclusion of
"The Old Curiosity Shop," appeared on the 17th of January, 1841, and
"Barnaby Rudge" began its course in the ensuing week. The first had
been essentially a tale of modern life. All the characters that made a
kind of background, mostly grotesque or hideous, for the figure of
Little Nell, were characters of to-day, or at least of the day when
the book was written; for I must not forget that that day ran into the
past some six and forty years ago. Quilp, the dwarf,--and a far finer
specimen of a scoundrel by the by, in every respect, than that poor
stage villain Monks; Sampson Brass and his legal sister Sally, a
goodly pair; Kit, golden-hearted and plain of body, who so barely
escapes from the plot laid by the afore-mentioned worthies to prove
him a thief; Chuckster, most lady-killing of notaries' clerks; Mrs.
Jarley, the good-natured waxwork woman, in whose soul there would be
naught save kindliness, only she cannot bring herself to tolerate
Punch and Judy; Short and Codlin, the Punch and Judy men; the little
misused servant, whom Dick Swiveller in his grandeur creates a
marchioness; and the magnificent Swiveller himself, prince among the
idle and impecunious, justifying by his snatches of song, and flowery
rhetoric, his high position as "perpetual grand-master" among