ance
with regard to women, that his readers felt for him a kind of personal
tenderness, quite distinct from their mere admiration for his genius
as a writer. Nor was that feeling based on his books alone. So far as
one could learn at the time, no great dissimilarity existed between
the author and the man. We all remember Byron's corrosive remark on
the sentimentalist Sterne, that he "whined over a dead ass, and
allowed his mother to die of hunger." But Dickens' feelings were by no
means confined to his pen. He was known to be a good father and a good
friend, and of perfect truth and honesty. The kindly tolerance for the
frailties of a father or brother which he admired in Little Dorrit, he
was ready to extend to his own father and his own brother. He was most
assiduous in the prosecution of his craft as a writer, and yet had
time and leisure of heart at command for all kinds of good and
charitable work. His private character had so far stood above all
floating cloud of suspicion.

That Dickens felt an honourable pride in the general affection he
inspired, can readily be understood. He also felt, even more
honourably, its great responsibility. He knew that his books and he
himself were a power for good, and he foresaw how greatly his
influence would suffer if a suspicion of hypocrisy--the vice at which
he had always girded--were to taint his reputation. Here, for
instance, in "Little Dorrit," the work written in the thick of his
home troubles, he had written of Clennam as "a man who had,
deep-rooted in his nature, a belief in all the gentle and good things
his life had been without," and had shown how this belief had "saved
Clennam still from the whimpering weakness and cruel selfishness of
holding that because such a happiness or such a virtue had not come
into his little path, or worked well for him, therefore it was not in
the great scheme, but was reducible, when found in appearance, to the
basest elements." A touching utterance if it expressed the real
feeling of a writer sorely disappointed and in great trouble; but an
utterance moving rather to contempt if it came from a writer who had
transferred his affections from his wife to some other woman. I do not
wonder, therefore, that Dickens, excited and exasperated, spoke out,
though I think it would have been better if he had kept silence.

But he did other things that were not justifiable. He quarrelled with
Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, his publishers, because they