comic song.  And to this some of his admirers would add—­the best lectures, and the best critical essays.  It is of course true that he has never reached or attempted to reach the gorgeous rhapsodies of De Quincey or the dithyrambic melodies of Ruskin.  But these heaven-born Pegasi cannot be harnessed to the working vehicles of our streets.  The marvel of Thackeray’s command over language is this—­that it is unfailing in prose or in verse, in pathos or in terror, in tragedy or in burlesque, in narrative, in repartee, or in drollery:  and that it never waxes or flags in force and precision throughout twenty-six full volumes.

Of Thackeray’s style—­a style that has every quality in perfection:  simplicity, clearness, ease, force, elasticity, and grace—­it is difficult to speak but in terms of unstinted admiration.  When we deal with the substance and effective value of his great books we see that, although Thackeray holds his own with the best writers of this century, he cannot be said to hold the same manifest crown of supremacy.  One of his strongest claims is the vast quantity and variety of his best work, and the singularly small proportion of inferior work.  Fielding himself wrote pitiful trash when he became, as he said, a mere “hackney writer”; Richardson’s Grandison overcomes most readers; Scott at last broke down; Carlyle, Disraeli, Dickens, and Ruskin have written many things which “we do not turn over by day and turn over by night,” to put it as gently as one can.  But Thackeray is hardly ever below himself in form, and rarely is he below himself in substance. Pendennis is certainly much inferior to Vanity Fair, and Philip is much inferior to Pendennis. The Virginians is far behind Esmond.  But of the more important books not one can be called in any sense a failure unless it be Lovel the Widower, and The Adventures of Philip.

Thackeray’s masterpiece beyond question is Vanity Fair—­which as a comedy of the manners of contemporary life is quite the greatest achievement in English literature since Tom Jones.  It has not the consummate plot of Tom Jones; it has not the breadth, the Shakespearean jollity, the genial humanity of the great “prose Homer”; it has no such beautiful character as Sophia Western.  It is not the overflowing of a warm, genial, sociable soul, such as that of Henry Fielding.  But Vanity Fair may be put beside Tom Jones for variety of character, intense reality, ingenuity of incident, and profusion of wit, humour, and invention.  It is even better written than Tom Jones; has more pathos and more tragedy; and is happily free from the nauseous blots into which Harry Fielding was betrayed by the taste of his age.  It is hard to say what scene in Vanity Fair, what part, what character, rests longest in the memory.  Is it the home of the Sedleys and the Osbornes, is it Queen’s Crawley, or the incidents at Brussels, or at Gaunt House:—­is it George Osborne, or Jos, or Miss Crawley, the Major or the Colonel,—­is it Lord Steyne or Rebecca?  All are excellent, all seem perfect in truth, in consistency, in contrast.