In 1847, upon the completion of this work, he began his History of Pendennis, in serial numbers, in which he presents the hero, Arthur Pendennis, as an average youth of the day, full of faults and foibles, but likewise generous and repentant.  Here he enlists the sympathies which one never feels for perfection; and here, too, he portrays female loveliness and endurance in his Mrs. Pendennis and Laura.  Arthur is a purer Tom Jones and Laura a superior Sophia Western.

In 1851 he gave a course of lectures, repeated in America the next year, on “the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century.”  There was no one better fitted to write such a course; he felt with them and was of them.  But if this enabled him to present them sympathetically, it also caused him to overrate them, and in some cases to descend to the standpoint of their own partial views.  He is wrong in his estimate of Swift, and too eulogistic of Addison; but he is thoroughly English in both.

HENRY ESMOND.—­The study of history necessary to prepare these led to his undertaking a novel on the time of Queen Anne, entitled The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., written by himself.  His appreciation of the age is excellent; but the book, leaving for the most part the comic field in which he was most at home, is drier and less read than his others; as an historical presentation a great success, with rare touches of pathos; as a work of fiction not equal to his other stories.  The comic muse assumes a tragic, or at least a very sombre, dress.  We have a portraiture of Queen Anne in her last days, and a sad picture of him who, to the Protestant succession, was the pretender, and to the hopeful Jacobites, James III.  The character of Marlborough is given with but little of what was really meritorious in that great captain.

His novel of Pendennis gave him, after the manner of Bulwer’s Caxton, an editor in Arthur Pendennis, who presents us The Newcomes, Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, which he published in a serial form, completing it in 1855.

THE NEWCOMES.—­In that work we have the richest culture, the finest satire, and the rarest social philosophy.  The character—­the hero by pre-eminence—­is Colonel Newcome, a nobleman of nature’s creation, generous, simple, a yearningly affectionate father, a friend to all the poor and afflicted, one of the best men ever delineated by a novelist; few hearts are so hard as not to be touched by the story of his death in his final retirement at the Charter House.  When, surrounded by weeping friends, he heard the bell, “a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said ‘Adsum,’ and fell back:  it was the word we used at school when names were called; and, lo! he, whose heart was that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of the Master.”