with his friends, generous and impulsive in his instincts, loving in his family, simple and humble in his spiritual nature, however questioning in his intellect.  That is a fair summary of Thackeray as revealed in his daily walk—­in his letters, acts and thoughts.  Nothing could be sweeter and more kindly than the mass of his writings in this regard, pace “The Book of Snobs”—­even in such a mood the satire is for the most part unbitter.  The reminiscential essays continually strike a tender note that vibrates with human feeling and such memorials as the paper he wrote on the deaths of Irving and Macaulay represent a frequent vein.  Thackeray’s friends are almost a unit in this testimony:  Edward Fitzgerald, indeed—­“dear old Fitz,” as Tennyson loved to call him—­declares in a letter to somebody that he hears Thackeray is spoiled:  meaning that his social success was too much for him.  It is true that after the fame of “Vanity Fair,” its author was a habitue of the best drawing-rooms, much sought after, and enjoying it hugely.  But to read his letter to Mrs. Brookfield after the return home from such frivolities is to feel that the real man is untouched.  Why Thackeray, with such a nature, developed a satirical bent and became a critic of the foibles of fashion and later of the social faults of humanity, is not so easy perhaps to say—­unless we beg the question by declaring it to be his nature.  When he began his major fiction at the age of thirty-seven he had seen much more of the seamy side of existence than had Dickens when he set up for author.  Thackeray had lost a fortune, traveled, played Bohemian, tried various employments, failed in a business venture—­in short, was an experienced man of the world with eyes wide open to what is light, mean, shifty and vague in the sublunary show.  “The Book of Snobs” is the typical early document expressing the subacidulous tendency of his power:  “Vanity Fair” is the full-length statement of it in maturity.  Yet judging his life by and large (in contrast with his work) up to the day of his sudden death, putting in evidence all the testimony from many sources, it may be asserted with considerable confidence that William Makepeace Thackeray, whatever we find him to be in his works, gave the general impression personally of being a genial, kind and thoroughly sound-hearted man.  We may, therefore, look at the work itself, to extract from it such evidence as it offers, remembering that, when all is said, the deepest part of a man, his true quality, is always to be discovered in his writings.

First a word on the books secondary to the four great novels.  It is necessary at the start in studying him to realize that Thackeray for years before he wrote novels was an essayist, who, when he came to make fiction introduced into it the essay touch and point of view.  The essay manner makes his larger fiction delightful, is one of its chief charms and characteristics.  And contrariwise, the looseness of construction, the lack of careful architecture in Thackeray’s stories, look to the same fact.