Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/207

 Rh. He would have done very well for a quiet life, but was sadly unsuited to that lively atmosphere of burglary and housebreaking. "Aladdin," says Mr. Froude, "remained a poor creature, for all his genii." As for Nell, I doubt if it would ever occur to a small innocent reader to think of her as a child at all. I was far from critical in those early days, and much disposed to agree with Lamb's amiable friend that all books must necessarily be good books. Nell was, in my eyes, a miracle of courage and capacity, a creature to be believed in implicitly, to be revered and pitied; but she was not a little girl. I was a little girl myself, and I knew the difference.

It was Dickens who first gave children their prestige in fiction. Jeffrey, we are assured, shed tears over Nell; and Bret Harte, whose own pathos is so profoundly touching, describes for us the rude and haggard miners following her fortunes with breathless sympathy:

At present we are spared the heartrending childish deathbeds which Dickens made so painfully popular, because dying in novels