' He had by this time got them into
the best parlour, where the portrait by Spiller and the bust by Spoker
were." And again, Mr. Pecksniff, hospitable at the supper table:
"'This,' he said, in allusion to the party, not the wine, 'is a Mingling
that repays one for much disappointment and vexation. Let us be merry.'
Here he took a captain's biscuit. 'It is a poor heart that never
rejoices; and our hearts are not poor. No!' With such stimulants to
merriment did he beguile the time and do the honours of the table."
Moreover it is a mournful thing and an inexplicable, that a man should be
as mad as Mr. Dick. None the less is it a happy thing for any reader to
watch Mr. Dick while David explains his difficulty to Traddles. Mr. Dick
was to be employed in copying, but King Charles the First could not be
kept out of the manuscripts; "Mr. Dick in the meantime looking very
deferentially and seriously at Traddles, and sucking his thumb." And the
amours of the gentleman in gaiters who threw the vegetable-marrows over
the garden wall. Mr. F.'s aunt, again! And Augustus Moddle, our own
Moddle, whom a great French critic most justly and accurately brooded
over. "Augustus, the gloomy maniac," says Taine, "makes us shudder." A
good medical diagnosis. Long live the logical French intellect!
Truly, Humour talks in his own language, nay, his own dialect, whereas
Passion and Pity speak the universal tongue.
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