iage. Not at this door. Take them things down the area steps,
young man," bawls out the domestic to a pastry-cook's boy ... and
John struggles back, closing the door on the astonished Colonel.'

An astonishment that most Londoners of his time would have assuredly
shared; unless, indeed, the West-end doorstep has gained wonderfully
by the scrubbing of sixty years. On the relations between masters and
servants Thackeray was never more severe than in this book; he is
irritated by the marching in of the household brigade to family
prayers, and he declares that we 'know no more of that race which
inhabits the basement floor, than of the men and brethren of
Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send missionaries'--a monstrous
imputation. He constantly resumes the moralising attitude; and his
pungent persiflage is poured out, as if from an apocalyptic vial, upon
worldliness and fashionable insolence. Sir Barnes Newcome's divorce
from the unhappy Lady Clara furnishes a text for sad and solemn
anathema upon the mercenary marriages in Hanover Square, where 'St.
George of England may behold virgin after virgin offered up to the
devouring monster, Mammon, may see virgin after virgin given away,
just as in the Soldan of Babylon's time, but with never a champion to
come to the rescue.' We would by no means withhold from the modern
satirist of manners the privilege of using forcibly figurative
language or of putting a lash to his whip. Yet if his novels are, as
we have suggested, to be regarded as historical, in the sense of
recording impressions drawn from life for the benefit of posterity,
such passages as those just quoted from Thackeray raise the general
question whether documentary evidence of this kind as to the state of
society at a given period is as valuable and trustworthy as it has
usually been reckoned to be. He has himself declared that 'upon the
morals and national manners, works of satire afford a world of light
that one would in vain look for in regular books of history'--that
_Pickwick_, _Roderick Random_, and _Tom Jones_, 'give us a better idea
of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any
pompous or authentic histories.' Whether Fielding and Smollett's
contemporaries would have endorsed this opinion is the real question;
for on such a point the judgment of Thackeray, who lived a century
after them, cannot be conclusive. It is probable that to an Englishman
of that day the novels of these tw