called a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor and his kindly
spirit are incompatible with cynicism. Charlotte Bronte said that
Fielding was the vulture and Thackeray the eagle. The comparison would
have been truer if made between Swift and Thackeray. Swift was a
cynic; his pen was driven by hate, but Thackeray's by love, and it was
not {275} in bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid bare the
wickedness of the world. He was himself a thorough man of the world,
and he had that dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes
the modern Englishman. But behind his satiric mask he concealed the
manliest tenderness, and a reverence for every thing in human nature
that is good and true. Thackeray's other great novels are _Pendennis_,
1849; _Henry Esmond_, 1852; and _The Newcomes_, 1855--the last of which
contains his most lovable character, the pathetic and immortal figure
of Colonel Newcome, a creation worthy to stand, in its dignity and its
sublime weakness, by the side of Don Quixote. It was alleged against
Thackeray that he made all his good characters, like Major Dobbin and
Amelia Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, and his
brilliant characters, like Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne and Blanche
Amory, morally bad. This is not entirely true, but the other
complaint--that his women are inferior to his men--is true in a general
way. Somewhat inferior to his other novels were _The Virginians_,
1858, and _The Adventures of Philip_, 1862. All of these were stories
of contemporary life, except _Henry Esmond_ and its sequel, _The
Virginians_, which, though not precisely historical fictions,
introduced historical figures, such as Washington and the Earl of
Peterborough. Their period of action was the 18th century, and the
dialogue was a cunning imitation of the language of that time.
Thackeray was strongly {276} attracted by the 18th century. His
literary teachers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson,
Richardson, Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and his special
master and model was Fielding. He projected a history of the century,
and his studies in this kind took shape in his two charming series of
lectures on _The English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_. These he
delivered in England and in America, to which country he, like Dickens,
made two several visits.

Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens's, less
fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; b