OP ARTS AND SCIPNC:ES. 97 



house dog growling out of an unreasonable antipathy towards 

 one of the neighbors. He won't let us have an atom of sympathy 

 with the designing creature until — well, it maybe very immoral 

 for a minister to confess it, but he really creates in the 'virtuous 

 breast a reactionary delight in the keen-witted scamp and a fer- 

 vent though wicked wish that she might succeed in her clever- 

 ness. As for Thackeray's good women they are simply exas- 

 perating, Mrs. Pendennis and Ivaura,- Henry Esmond's gracious 

 lady, Amelia Sedley. Kven Kthel Newcome is not much bet- 

 ter, hardly more than a shadow, and Beatrix Esmond, who does 

 not pretend to be exactly good, we may count the most success- 

 ful of the assembly. 



And yet with all these abatements it is a large and varied 

 world he sets forth in his pages ; it is the picture gallery of a 

 wide-eyed traveler. He has seen many lands and many faces, 

 like the much-enduring Ulysses. None have, disclosed as he 

 the life of the average modern man in certain social grades. 

 Major Pendennis is enough to make one novelist's reputation. 

 He knows well the men of the press and the ball-room, the camp 

 and the court. He seems to hover on the verge of the grotesque 

 and the caricature all the time, and yet makes you appreciate 

 the undeniable truth of his lives and sketches. The life of the 

 school and the college not even Kipling has given with such 

 fidelity, and ' ' Grey-friars ' ' is classic ground to all English read- 

 ers since the Charter-house disappeared. The life of the valet, 

 of the returned East Indians, of British travelers abroad, of the 

 petty German counts, the wild Bohemianism and cavieraderie of 

 the London inns of court and the coffee-houses down to the inim- 

 itable " Back Kitchen " of Pendennis, all is gathered up with a 

 masterly hand. And then that wonderful power of realizing a 

 past age in Henry Esmond, the most finished and complete work 

 of the sort ever accomplished ! I cannot praise highly enough 

 its vivid presentation of the very atmosphere of Queen Anne's 

 Eondon and the very thoughts and feelings of the world as it 

 went then. So great is this range of insight into many varieties 

 of human nature that in the future men will go to Thackeray as 

 the true historian of the middle 19th century in England. I 



