premeditated, his sentiment shallow, while there are heights from which he is manifestly shut out. When he attempts to draw a gentleman or an average mortal distinguished by no special absurdities, the result is apt to be singularly insipid and lifeless. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Dickens has won notable successes outside the field of pure humor. His Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a powerful story, quite different from his usual manner, and many scenes throughout his other books, as the famous description of the storm in David Copperfield, are triumphs of tragic power.

William

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) is the keen but kindly satirist of that surface world of frivolity and fashion into which the art of Dickens so seldom penetrates. Thack- Makepeace eray was born at Calcutta, but was early Thackeray. sent to England for his education. He had something of that regular training which Dickens lacked, going to Cambridge from the Charter-house School in London. He left college, however, shortly after entering, to study art on the Continent, and finally, losing his money, he returned to England, and about 1837 drifted into literature. After writing much for periodicals, he made his first great success in Vanity Fair (1847-1848). In this book, under its satiric and humorous delineation of a world of hollowness and pretense, runs the strong current of a deep and serious purpose. "Such people there are," Thackeray writes, stepping "down from the platform," like his master, Fielding, to speak in his own person-" such people there are living and flourishing

in the world-Faithless, Hopeless, Charity less; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful, too, mere quacks and fools; and it was to combat and expose such as these, no doubt, that laughter was made.*"

The passage is better than any outside comment on the spirit of Thackeray's work; only the shallow and undiscriminating reader fails to see that Thackeray's seriousness is deeper and more vital than his cynicism; that though the smile of the man of the world be on his lips, few hearts are more gentle, more compassionate, more tender; that though he is quick to scorn, few eyes have looked out on this unintelligible world through more kindly or more honest tears. Satirist as he is, he kneels with the genuine and whole-souled devotion of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, and of Milton, before the simple might of innocence and of goodness. In the midst of this world of Vanity Fair, with its pettiness, its knavery, and its foolishness, he places the unspoiled Amelia and the honest and faithful Major Dobbin. If in Pendennis we have the world as it looks to the idlers in the Major's club windows, we have also Laura, and "Pen's" confiding mother, apart from it, and unspotted by its taint. But more beautiful than all other creations of Thackeray's reverent and loving nature is the immortal presence of Colonel Newcome, the man whose memory we hold sacred as that of one we have loved-the strong, humble, simple-minded gentleman, the grizzled soldier with the heart of a little child. In such characters Thackeray, too, preaches to us, in his * Vanity Fair, vol. i. chap. viii.

own fashion, the old lesson dear to lofty souls,

that

"Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt;

Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled."*

So he echoes Scott's dying injunction to Lockhart: "Be a good man, my dear," by showing us, in the corruption of much that is mean and vile, that beauty of holiness which can

"redeem nature from the general curse,"

that fair flower of simple goodness which, blossoming in tangled and thorny ways, sweetens for us the noisome places of the earth.

In addition to his work as painter of contemporary manners, Thackeray has enriched the literature by two remarkable historical novels, Henry Esmond (1852), and its sequel, The Virginians (1857-1859). In the first of these we have the fruits of Thackeray's careful and loving study of eighteenth century England, a period with which he was especially identified, and which he had treated critically with extraordinary charm and sympathy in his Lectures on the English Humorists (published 1853). Esmond is one of the greatest, possibly the greatest historical novel in English fiction. The story is supposed to be told by Esmond himself, and the book seems less that of a modern writing about the past than the contemporary record of the past itself. Nothing is more wonderful in it than the art with which Thackeray abandons his usual manner to identify himself with

* Milton's Comus, p. 177, supra.