ands until I
finished it."

"That's more than I can say," said the curate. "I don't like Thackeray.
He cuts up every one and everything. Is not that a cynic for you?"

"Not everybody," said Min--I cannot call her anything else now--coming
to my assistance, "not everybody, Mr Mawley. I think Thackeray, with
all his satire and kindly laughter in his sleeve at persons that ought
to be laughed down, has yet given us some of the most pathetic touches
of human nature existing in English literature. There's the old colonel
in _The Newcomes_, for instance. That little bit about his teaching his
tiny grandson to say his prayers, before he put him into bed in his poor
chamber in the Charter House, to which he was reduced, would make any
one cry. And Henry Esmond, and Warrington, and Laura--where would you
find more nobly-drawn characters than those?" and she stopped, out of
breath with her defence of one of the greatest writers we have ever had,
indignant, with such a pretty indignation, at his merits being
questioned for a moment.

"Of course I must bow to your decision, Miss Clyde," said the curate,
with one of those stock ceremonial bows that stood him in such good
stead amongst the female community of the parish. He was a cunning
fellow, Mawley. Knew which way his interest lay; and never went against
the ladies if he could help it. "But," he continued, "if we talk of
pathos, there's `the great master of fiction,' Dickens; who can come up
to him?"

"Ah, yes! Mr Mawley,"--chorused the majority of the girls--"we quite
agree with you: there's nobody like Dickens!"

It is a strange thing how perverse the divine sex is, in preferring
confectionery to solid food; and superficial writers, to those who dive
beneath the surface of society and expose its rottenness--like as they
esteem Tupper's weak-minded version of Solomon's Proverbs beyond the
best poetry that ever was written!

I wasn't going to be beaten by the curate, however, prattled he never so
wisely with the cunning of the serpent-charmer. "I grant you," said I,
"that Dickens appeals oftener to our susceptible sympathies; but he is
_unreal_ in comparison with Thackeray. The one was a far more correct
student of human nature than the other. Dickens selected
exceptionalities and invested them with attributes which we never see
possessed by their prototypes whom we may meet in the world. He gives
us either caricature, or pictures of men and women seen throug