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 through a rose-coloured medium: Thackeray, on the other hand, shows you life as it is. He takes you behind the scenes and lets you perceive for yourself how the ‘dummies’ and machinery are managed, how rough the distemper painting, all beauty from the front of ‘the house,’ looks on nearer inspection, how the ‘lifts’ work, and the ‘flats’ are pushed on; besides disclosing all the secrets connected with masks and ‘properties.’ He is not content in merely allowing you to witness the piece from before the curtain, in the full glory of that distance from the place of action which lends enchantment to the view, and with all the deceptive concomitants of music and limelights and Bengal fire! To adopt another illustration, I should say that Dickens was the John Leech of fictional literature, Thackeray its Hogarth. Even Jerrold, I think, in his most bitter, cynical moods, was truer to life and nature than Dickens. Did you ever read the former’s Story of a Feather, by the way?”

“No,” answered 

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