e for the London streets. It seemed almost as if they were
essential to the exercise of his genius. The same strange mental
phenomenon which he had observed in himself at Genoa was reproduced
here. Everything else in his surroundings smiled most congenially. The
place was fair beyond speech. The shifting, changing beauty of the
mountains entranced him. The walks offered an endless variety of
enjoyment. He liked the people. He liked the English colony. He had
made several dear friends among them and among the natives. He was
interested in the politics of the country, which happened, just then,
to be in a state of peculiar excitement and revolution. Everything was
charming;--"but," he writes, "the toil and labour of writing, day
after day, without that magic-lantern (of the London streets) is
IMMENSE!" It literally knocked him up. He had "bad nights," was "sick
and giddy," desponding over his book, more than half inclined to
abandon the Christmas story altogether for that year. However, a short
trip to Geneva, and the dissipation of a stroll or so in its
thoroughfares, to remind him, as it were, of what streets were like,
and a week of "idleness" "rusting and devouring," "complete and
unbroken," set him comparatively on his legs again, and before he left
Lausanne for Paris on the 16th of November, he had finished three
parts of "Dombey," and the "Battle of Life."

Of the latter I don't know that I need say anything. It is decidedly
the weakest of his Christmas books. But "Dombey" is very different
work, and the first five numbers especially, which carry the story to
the death of little Paul, contain passages of humour and pathos, and
of humour and pathos mingled together and shot in warp and woof, like
some daintiest silken fabric, that are scarcely to be matched in the
language. As I go in my mind through the motherless child's short
history--his birth, his christening, the engagement of the wet-nurse,
the time when he is consigned to the loveless care of Mrs. Pipchin,
his education in Dr. Blimber's Academy under the classic Cornelia, and
his death--as I follow it all in thought, now smiling at each
well-remembered touch of humour, and now saddened and solemnized as
the shadow of death deepens over the frail little life, I confess to
something more than critical admiration for the writer as an artist. I
feel towards him as towards one who has touched my heart. Of course it
is the misfortune of the book, regarding it as a