o authors appeared to be
extraordinary caricatures of actual society, in town or country.

On the other hand, the story is excellently conducted, and each actor
performs with consummate skill his part or hers; for in none of his
works has Thackeray given higher proof of that dramatic power which
brings out situations, leads on to the _denouement_, and points the
moral of the story, by a skilful manipulation of various incidents and
a remarkably numerous variety of characters. There, is one chapter
(ix. of vol. II.), headed 'Two or Three Acts of a Little Comedy,'
where he carries on the plot entirely by a light and sparkling
dialogue which may be compared to some of A. de Musset's wittiest
_Proverbes_. It is a book that could only have been composed by a
first-class artist in the maturity of his powers; and for that very
reason we must regret that it is steeped in bitterness; while
Thackeray's rooted hostility to mothers-in-law misguides him into the
aesthetic error of admitting a virago to scold frantically almost over
the colonel's death-bed. The unvarying meanness and selfishness of
Mrs. Mackenzie, and of Sir Barnes Newcome, fatigue the reader; for
whereas in the delineation of his amiable and high-principled
characters Thackeray is careful to shade off their bright qualities by
a mixture of natural weakness, these ill-favoured portraits stand out
in the full glare of unredeemed insolence and low cunning.

In his last novel, broken off half-way by his death, Thackeray went
back once more to that eighteenth century, which, as he says in one of
his letters, 'occupied him to the exclusion almost of the nineteenth,'
and to the method of weaving fiction out of historical materials. We
have already remarked upon his practice of opening with a kind of
family history, which explains the antecedent connections,
relationship, and pedigree of the persons who are coming upon the
stage, and marks out the background of his story. In _Denis Duval_ he
carries this preamble through two chapters, and arranges all the
pieces on his board so carefully that an inattentive reader might lose
his way among the preliminary details. One sees with what pleasure he
has studied his favourite period in France and England, and how he
enjoyed constructing, like Defoe, a fictitious autobiography that
reads like a picturesque and genuine memoir of the times. Having thus
laid out his plan, and prepared his _mise en scene_, he begins his
third chapter