which the world cannot forgive, and perhaps ought not to forgive.  The sum of all this is, that in all these twenty-six volumes and hundreds of men and women portrayed, there is not one man or one woman having at once a noble character, perfect generosity, powerful mind, and loveable nature; not one man or one woman of tender heart and perfect honour, but has some trait that tends to make him or her either laughable or tedious.  It is not so with the supreme masters of the human heart.  And the world does not condone this, and it is right in not condoning it.

But to say this, is not to condemn Thackeray as a cynic.  With these many scenes of exquisite tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray’s work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness.  On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life.  Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination that was far stronger on the darker and fouler sides of life than it was on the brighter and pure side of life.  He saw the bright and pure side:  he loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it.  But his artistic genius worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and the foul.  His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise, of that just vision of chiaroscuro, which we find in the greatest masters of the human heart.  This limitation of his genius has been visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand.  And such as it is, he must bear it.

The place of Thackeray in English literature will always be determined by his Vanity Fair:  which will be read, we may confidently predict, as long as Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, The Antiquary, and Pickwick.  But all the best of his pieces, even the smaller jeux d’esprit, may be read with delight again and again by young and old.  And of the best are—­Esmond, The Newcomes, Barry Lyndon, the Book of Snobs, the Hoggarty Diamond, some of the Burlesques and Christmas Books, and the English Humourists.  Of these, Esmond has every quality of a great book, except its artificial form, its excessive elaboration of historical colouring, and its unsavoury plot.  Beatrix Esmond is almost as wonderful a creation as Becky Sharp; though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than that incorrigible minx.  The Newcomes, if in some ways the most genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of Vanity Fair.  And if Barry Lyndon has this power, it is an awful picture of cruelty