They liked the book the better the more it made them cry.

The line satirizes a common kind of readerly taste: valuing a book chiefly for the strength of its sentimental effect. “The more it made them cry” implies an appetite for pathos as a kind of entertainment or moral credential—tears standing in for judgment about artistic merit. Read as Goldsmithian irony, it also hints at the 18th‑century vogue for “sentimental” literature, where scenes of suffering and virtue were designed to elicit sympathetic emotion. The remark can be taken as a critique of emotionalism divorced from discernment, suggesting that a work’s popularity may rest less on its truth or craft than on its ability to manipulate feeling.