e of satire is so
audible in the following quotation from _Pendennis_ that he might well
have written it:

'Even his child, his cruel Emily, he would have taken to his heart
and forgiven with tears; and what more can one say of the Christian
charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive those
who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in a
dispute?'

As we have said that _Vanity Fair_ touches the climax of Thackeray's
peculiar genius, so in our judgment _Esmond_ shows the gathered
strength and maturity of his literary power, and has won for him an
eminent place in the distinguished order of historical novelists. We
may say that the art of historical romance was brought to perfection
in our own century, although French writers trace far back into the
eighteenth century, and even further, the method of weaving authentic
events and famous personages into the tissue of a story which turns
upon fictitious adventures in love and war. The elder novelists dealt
largely in extravagant sentiment, in conventional language, and in
marvellous exploits embroidered upon the sober chronicles which served
as the framework of their drama; they were content to set upon stilts
the traditional hero or heroine of former days, whose ideas and
conversation expressed with little disguise the manners, not of the
period to which they belonged, but of the author's own time and of the
society for whom he was writing. These books are, therefore, full of
glaring anachronisms and improbabilities; the knights and dames are
sometimes (as in the _Grand Cyrus_) thinly veiled portraits of
contemporary notabilities, but they are often mere lay figures
representing the prevailing fashions of thought and feeling. The
virtuous hero abounds in judicious reflections; the heroines are
chaste and beauteous damsels--Joan of Arc herself appears in one
romance as an adorable shepherdess--and love-making is conducted after
the model of a Parisian _precieuse_.

It is the opinion of a recent French critic, who has made careful
study of his subject, that the new school was founded by
Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to
the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque
incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping
them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by
picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, usages, and
con