WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.—­Dickens gives us real characters in the garb of fiction; but Thackeray uses fiction as the vehicle of social philosophy.  Great name, second only to Dickens; he is not a story-teller, but an eastern Cadi administering justice in the form of apologue.  Dickens is eminently dramatic; Thackeray has nothing dramatic, neither scene nor personage.  He is Democritus the laughing philosopher, or Jupiter the thunderer; he arraigns vice, pats virtue on the shoulder, shouts for muscular Christianity, uncovers shams,—­his personages are only names.  Dickens describes individuals; Thackeray only classes:  his men and women are representatives, and, with but few exceptions, they excite our sense of justice, but not our sympathy; the principal exception is Colonel Newcome, a real individual creation upon whom Thackeray exhausted his genius, and he stands alone.

Thackeray was born in Calcutta, of an old Yorkshire family, in 1811.  His father was in the civil service, and he was sent home, when a child of seven, for his education at the Charter House in London.  Thence he was entered at Cambridge, but left without being graduated.  An easy fortune of L20,000 led him to take life easily; he studied painting with somewhat of the desultory devotion he has ascribed to Clive Newcome, and, like that worthy, travelled on the Continent.  Partly by unsuccessful investments, and partly by careless living, his means were spent, and he took up writing as a profession.  The comic was his forte, and his early pieces, written under the pseudonym of Michael Angelo Fitzmarsh and George Fitz Boodle, are broadly humorous, but by no means in his later finished style. The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841) did not disclose his full powers.

In 1841, Punch, a weekly comic illustrated sheet, was begun, and it opened to Thackeray a field which exactly suited him.  Short scraps of comedy, slightly connected sketches, and the weekly tale of brick, chimed with his humor, and made him at once a favorite.  The best of these serial contributions were The Snob Papers:  they are as fine specimens of humorous satire as exist in the language.  But these would not have made him famous, as they did not disclose his power as a novelist.

VANITY FAIR.—­This was done by his Vanity Fair, which was published, in monthly numbers, between 1846 and 1848.  It was at once popular, and is the most artistic of all his works.  He called it a novel without a hero, and he is right; the mind repudiates all aspirants for the post, and settles upon poor Major Sugar-Plums as the best man in it.  He could not have said without a heroine, for does not the world since ring with the fame of Becky Sharpe, the cleverest and wickedest little woman in England?  The virtuous reader even is sorry that Becky must come to grief, as, with a proper respect to morality, the novelist makes her.

Never had the Vanity Fair of European society received so scathing a dissection; and its author was immediately recognized as one of the greatest living satirists and novelists.  If he adheres more to the old school of Fielding, who was his model, in his plots and handling of the story, he was evidently original in his satire.