delineations of character. For diplomatists he has always a curious
contempt, and he never misses an opportunity of ridiculing them. 'Mon
Dieu,' says Lyndon, 'what fools they are; what dullards, what
fribbles, what addle-headed coxcombs; this is one of the lies of the
world, this diplomacy'--as if it were not also a most important and
difficult branch of the national services. Abject reverence of great
folk he regarded as the besetting disease of middle-class Englishmen;
and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord
Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was
ready to go on his knees to any one who resembled a man of fashion.'
And the kindly cynicism which discoloured Thackeray's ideas about
women, notwithstanding his tender admiration and love for the best of
them, comes out pointedly in old Sir Charles Lyndon's advice to Barry
on the subject of matrimony:

'Get a friend, sir, and that friend a woman, a good household
drudge, who loves you. _That_ is the most precious sort of
friendship, for the expense of it is all on the woman's side. The
man need not contribute anything. If he's a rogue, she'll vow he's
an angel; if he's a brute, she will like him all the better for his
ill-treatment of her. They like it, sir, these women; they are born
to be our greatest comforts and conveniences, our moral boot-jacks,
as it were.'

Barry Lyndon discloses the promise and potency of Thackeray's genius.
In _Vanity Fair_, his next work, it has attained its climax; the
dramatic figures are more finely conceived, the plot is varied and
more skilfully elaborated, the actors more numerous and life-like; and
whereas in his preceding stories he has mainly used the form of a
fictitious memoir, whereby the hero is made to tell his own tale, in
this 'Novel without a Hero' the author proceeds by narration. The tone
is still governed by irony and pathos, wherein Thackeray chiefly
excels; yet the contrasts between weak and strong natures, the
superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and
unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer
hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted
virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the
human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their
virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated,
for the purposes o