looked at the sleeping girl. How dared he--who was he--to pray for
one so spotless! God bless her! God bless her! He came to the
bedside, and looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep,
and he bent over the pillow noiselessly towards the gentle pale
face. Two fair arms closed tenderly round his neck as he stooped
down. 'I am awake, George,' the poor child said, with a sob."

I know I am making enemies of a large proportion of the readers of
this page. "Odious, sneering beast!" is the quotation which they
will apply, perhaps unconscious of its origin, to a critic who is
humble but would fain be honest, to a critic who thinks that Dickens
has his weak places, and that his pathos is one of these. It cannot
be helped. Each of us has his author who is a favourite, a friend,
an idol, whose immaculate perfection he maintains against all
comers. For example, things are urged against Scott; I receive them
in the attitude of the deaf adder of St. Augustine, who stops one
ear with his tail and presses the other against the dust. The same
with Moliere: M. Scherer utters complaints against Moliere! He
would not convince me, even if I were convinced. So, with regard to
Dickens, the true believer will not listen, he will not be
persuaded. But if any one feels a little shaken, let him try it
another way. There is a character in M. Alphonse Daudet's "Froment
Jeune et Rissler Aine"--a character who, people say, is taken bodily
from Dickens. This is Desiree Delobelle, the deformed girl, the
daughter of un rate, a pretentious imbecile actor. She is poor,
stunted, laborious, toiling at a small industry; she is in love, is
rejected, she tries to drown herself, she dies. The sequence of
ideas is in Dickens's vein; but read the tale, and I think you will
see how little the thing is overdone, how simple and unforced it is,
compared with analogous persons and scenes in the work of the