“came and took his place calmly” and practically at once (or with the preliminary only of “Boz”) in Pickwick.  Whether he ever went further may at least be questioned.  But Thackeray did not take his place at once—­in fact he conspicuously failed to take it for some sixteen years:  although he produced, for at least the last ten of these, work containing indications of extraordinary power, in a variety of directions almost as extraordinary.

To attempt to assign reasons for this comparative failure would be idle—­the fact is the only reasonable reason.  But some phenomena and symptoms can be diagnosed.  It is at least noteworthy that Thackeray—­in this approaching Dickens perhaps nearer than in any other point—­began with extravaganza—­to adopt perhaps the most convenient general name for a thing which cannot be quite satisfactorily designated by any.  In both cases the adoption was probably due to the example and popularity of Theodore Hook.  But it was also due, in a higher and more metaphysical sense, to the fact that the romance, which had had so mighty a success in Scott’s hands, was for the time overblown, and that the domestic novel, despite the almost equally wonderful, though much quieter and less popular achievement of Miss Austen, was not thoroughly and genuinely ready.  From extravaganza in a certain sense Dickens, as has been said, never really departed:  and he achieved most of his best work in his own peculiar varieties of it.  Thackeray was, if not to leave it entirely aside, to use it in his later days merely as an occasional variation and seasoning.  But at first he could not, apparently, get free from it:  and he might have seemed unable to dispense with its almost mechanical externalities of mis-spelling and the like.  It must also be remembered that circumstances were at first curiously unfavourable to him:  and that loss of fortune, domestic affliction, and other things almost compelled him to write from hand to mouth—­to take whatever commission offered itself:  whereas the, if not immediate, speedy and tremendous success of Pickwick put the booksellers entirely at Dickens’s feet.  Still, a certain vacillation—­an uncertainty of design not often accompanying genius like his—­must be acknowledged in Thackeray.  For a time he hesitated between pen and pencil, the latter of which implements he fortunately never abandoned, though the former was his predestined wand.  Then he could not, or would not, for years, get out of the “miscellaneous” style, or patchwork of styles—­reviews, short stories, burlesques, what not.  His more important attempts seemed to have an attendant guignon.[22] Catherine (1839-1840), a very powerful thing in parts, was ill-planned and could not be popular. A Shabby Genteel Story (1841), containing almost the Thackerayan quiddity, was interrupted partly by his wife’s illness, partly, it would seem, by editorial disfavour, and moreover still failed to shake off the appearance