writing, which sinks in quality in proportion to the rise in
quantity.

How far the character and personal experiences of an author are
revealed or disguised in his writings is a question which has often
been discussed. Bulwer once endeavoured, in a whimsical essay, to
prove that men of letters are the only people whose characters are
really ascertainable, because you may know them intimately by their
works; but herein he merely touched upon the general truth or truism
that society at large judges every man only by his public
performances, and does not trouble itself at all about anything else.
In the category of those who display in their writings their tastes
and prejudices, their feelings and the special bent of their mind, we
may certainly place Thackeray, who was a moralist and a satirist, very
sensitive to the ills and follies of humanity, and impressionable in
the highest degree. For such a man it was impossible to refrain from
giving his opinions, his praise or his blame, in all that he wrote
upon everything that interested him; and in portraying the society
which surrounded him, he inevitably portrayed himself. He displayed as
much as any writer the general complexion of his intellectual
propensities and sympathies; and we can even trace in him the
existence of some of the minor human frailties which he was most apt
to condemn, an unconscious tendency which is not altogether uncommon.
But he is essentially a high-minded man of letters, acutely sensitive
to absurdities, impatient of meanness, of affectation, and of
ignominious admiration of trivial things; a resolute representative of
the independent literary spirit, with a strong desire to see things as
they are, and with the gift of describing them truthfully. He
repudiated 'the absurd outcry about neglected men of genius'; and in a
letter quoted by Mrs. Ritchie he writes:

'I have been earning my own bread with my own pen for near twenty
years now, and sometimes very hardly too; but in the worst time,
please God, never lost my own respect.'

His delicacy of feeling comes out in a letter from the United States,
where he was lecturing--

'As for writing about this country, about Goshen, about the
friends I have found here, and who are helping me to procure
independence for my children, if I cut jokes upon them, may I
choke on the instant'--

having probably in remembrance, as he wrote, Charles Dickens and the
_American