the Evil One was upon Becky; and it was the stupidity of a good nature which made the Colonel never suspect it.  He was a cheat, a black-leg, an unprincipled dog; but still “Rawdon is a man, and be hanged to him,” as the Rector says.  We follow him through the illustrations, which are, in many instances, a delightful enhancement to the text—­as he stands there, with his gentle eyelid, coarse moustache, and foolish chin, bringing up Becky’s coffee-cup with a kind of dumb fidelity; or looking down at little Rawdon with a more than paternal tenderness.  All Amelia’s philoprogenitive idolatries do not touch us like one fond instinct of “stupid Rawdon.”

Dobbin sheds a halo over all the long-necked, loose-jointed, Scotch-looking gentlemen of our acquaintance.  Flat feet and flap ears seem henceforth incompatible with evil.  He reminds us of one of the sweetest creations that have appeared from any modern pen—­that plain, awkward, loveable “Long Walter,” in Lady Georgina Fullerton’s beautiful novel of “Grantley Manor.”  Like him, too, in his proper self-respect; for Dobbin—­lumbering, heavy, shy, and absurdly over modest as the ugly fellow is—­is yet true to himself.  At one time he seems to be sinking into the mere abject dangler after Amelia; but he breaks his chains like a man, and resumes them again like a man, too, although half disenchanted of his amiable delusion.

But to return for a moment to Becky.  The only criticism we would offer is one which the author has almost disarmed by making her mother a Frenchwoman.  The construction of this little clever monster is diabolically French.  Such a lusus naturae as a woman without a heart and conscience would, in England, be a mere brutal savage, and poison half a village.  France is the land for the real Syren, with the woman’s face and the dragon’s claws.  The genus of Pigeon and Laffarge claims it for its own—­only that our heroine takes a far higher class by not requiring the vulgar matter of fact of crime to develop her full powers.  It is an affront to Becky’s tactics to believe that she could ever be reduced to so low a resource, or, that if she were, anybody would find it out.  We, therefore, cannot sufficiently applaud the extreme discretion with which Mr. Thackeray has hinted at the possibly assistant circumstances of Joseph Sedley’s dissolution.  A less delicacy of handling would have marred the harmony of the whole design.  Such a casualty as that suggested to our imagination was not intended for the light net of Vanity Fair to draw on shore; it would have torn it to pieces.  Besides it is not wanted.  Poor little Becky is bad enough to satisfy the most ardent student of “good books.”  Wickedness, beyond a certain pitch, gives no increase of gratification even to the sternest moralist; and one of Mr. Thackeray’s excellences is the sparing quantity he consumes.  The whole use, too, of the work—­that of generously measuring one another by this standard—­is