Poor, Esoteric Buddhism, and a score of other plagues, including what was once called Estheticism, are all, primarily, due to want of humor. People discuss, with the gravest faces, matters which properly should only be stated as the wildest paradoxes. It naturally follows that, in a period almost destitute of humor, many respectable persons "cannot read Dickens," and are not ashamed to glory in their shame. We ought not to be angry with others for their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the cretins who boast that they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.

How very singular has been the history of the decline of humor. Is there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from consideration of the fact that humor has gone out with cruelty? A hundred years ago, eighty years ago-nay, fifty years ago we were a cruel but also a humorous people. We had bull-baitings, and badger-drawings, and hustings, and prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went to see men hanged; the pillory and the stocks were no empty " terrors unto evil-doers," for there was commonly a malefactor occupying each of these institutions. With all this we had a broad-blown comic sense. We had Hogarth, and Bunbury, and George Cruikshank, and Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees, and the creator of Tittlebat Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the "Noctes," and, above all, we had you.

From the old giants of English fun-burly persons delighting in broad caricature, in decided colors, in cockney jokes, in swashing blows at the more prominent and obvious human follies — from these you derived the splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your earlier works. Mr. Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all the Pickwickians, and Mr. Dowler, and John Browdie-these and their immortal companions were reared, so to speak, on the beef and beer of that naughty, fox-hunting, badger-baiting old England which we have improved out of existence. And these characters, assuredly, are your best; by them, though stupid people cannot read about them, you will live while there is a laugh left among us. Perhaps that does not assure you a very prolonged existence, but only the future can show.

The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last forever and a day. Honest old Laughter, the true lutin of your inspiration, must have life left in him yet, and cannot die;

though it is true that the taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed after your favorite fashion (“Great Expectations" and the "Tale of Two Cities" are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted. Were people simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is concerned, a generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-headed shallow critic, who declared that Wordsworth "would never do," cried, "wept like anything," over your Little Nell. One still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller; but who can cry over Little Nell?

Ah, Sir, how could you-who knew so intimately, who remembered so strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood - how could you "wallow naked in the pathetic," and massacre holocausts of the Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a child's death-bed, was it worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved.

She was more than usual calm,

She did not give a single dam,

wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over your Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual calm; and probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. But about matter of this kind, and the unsealing of the fountains of tears, who can argue? Where is taste? where is truth? What tears are "manly, Sir, manly," as Fred Bayham has it; and of what lamentations ought we rather to be ashamed? Sunt lacrymæ rerum; one has been moved in the cell where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or by the riverbanks where Syracusan arrows slew the parched Athenians among the mire and blood; or, in fiction, when Colonel Newcome said Adsum, or over the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or where Aramis laments, with strange tears, the death of Porthos. But over Dombey (the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel.

When an author deliberately sits down and says, "Now, let us have a good cry," he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in many breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of "Dombey and Son" there is little we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots; just as we forget the melodramatics of "Martin Chuzzlewit." I have read in that book a score of times; I never see it, but I revel in it-in Pecksniff, and Mrs.

Gamp, and the Americans. But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did, what Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the pictures with plenty of shading illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend. In the same way one of your most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the license of private conversation) that "Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;" and probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little precipitous.

"Too steep; "- the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius, carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the failing which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy thought the seedsman "a very happy man to have so many little drawers in his shop." The reflection is thoroughly boyish; but then you add, "I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom." That is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at work.

"So we arraign her; but she," the Genius of Charles Dickens, how brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain of laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt in the neighboring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy would be, how "dispeopled of her dreams," if, in some ruin of the social system, the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with Menander's men and women! We cannot think of our world without them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms. May we not almost welcome "Free Education"? for every Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for you.

TO MONSIEUR DE MOLIÈRE, VALET DE CHAMBRE DU Roi.

MONSIEUR, - With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the great Molière! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his comb!) at the door of the Grand Mon

arch, so I presume to draw near your dwelling among the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Molière-you found your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France, you achieved for French comedy; and the bâton of Scapin still wields its sway though the sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame the Channel. If England vanquished your country's arms, it was through you that France ferum victorem cepit, and restored the dynasty of Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden borrowed "L'Etourdi," our tardy, apish nation has lived (in matters theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.

In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Molière. Now they are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain. But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and imitated your successes-still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our bien, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it. We are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a comedy pleases the town which has not first been "cut out" from the countrymen of Molière. Why this should be, and what "tenebriferous star" (as Paracelsus, your companion in the "Dialogues des Morts," would have believed) thus darkens the sun of English humor, we know not; but certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you. Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor "a wilderness of monkeys," like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and restored her to Europe.

While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that we must turn when of comedies we desire the best. If you studied with daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you "let no musty bouquin escape you" (so your enemies declared), it was to some purpose that you labored. Shakspeare excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: