natures, are the tragic themes which Thackeray handles by preference.  He has been called a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor and his kindly spirit are incompatible with cynicism.  Charlotte Bronte said that Fielding was the vulture and Thackeray the eagle.  The comparison would have been truer if made between Swift and Thackeray.  Swift was a cynic; his pen was driven by hate, but Thackeray’s by love, and it was not in bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid bare the wickedness of the world.  He was himself a thorough man of the world, and he had that dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes the modern Englishman.  But behind his satiric mask he concealed the manliest tenderness, and a reverence for every thing in human nature that is good and true.  Thackeray’s other great novels are Pendennis, 1849; Henry Esmond, 1852, and The Newcomes, 1855—­the last of which contains his most lovable character, the pathetic and immortal figure of Colonel Newcome, a creation worthy to stand, in its dignity and its sublime weakness, by the side of Don Quixote.  It was alleged against Thackeray that he made all his good characters, like Major Dobbin and Amelia Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, and his brilliant characters, like Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne and Blanche Amory, morally bad.  This is not entirely true, but the other complaint—­that his women are inferior to his men—­is true in a general way.  Somewhat inferior to his other novels were The Virginians, 1858, and The Adventures of Philip, 1862.  All of these were stories of contemporary life, except Henry Esmond and its sequel, The Virginians, which, though not precisely historical fictions, introduced historical figures, such as Washington and the Earl of Peterborough.  Their period of action was the 18th century, and the dialogue was a cunning imitation of the language of that time.  Thackeray was strongly attracted by the 18th century.  His literary teachers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson, Richardson, Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and his special master and model was Fielding.  He projected a history of the century, and his studies in this kind took shape in his two charming series of lectures on The English Humorists and The Four Georges.  These he delivered in England and in America, to which country he, like Dickens, made two several visits.

[Illustration:  Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, Dickens.]

Thackeray’s genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens’s; less fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his delineation of character more truthful.  After one has formed a taste for his books, Dickens’s sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his humor will have the air of buffoonery.  Thackeray had the advantage in another particular:  he described the life of the upper classes, and Dickens of the lower.  It may be true that the latter offers richer material