he stood up in Willis's Rooms to inform a polite audience
concerning his great predecessors. Concerning their work? No.
Concerning their genius? No. Concerning the debt owed to them by
mankind? Not a bit of it. Concerning their _lives_, ladies and
gentlemen; and whether their lives were pure and respectable and free
from scandal and such as men ought to have led whose works you would
like your sons and daughters to handle. Mr. Frank T. Marzials,
Thackeray's latest biographer, finds the matter of these Lectures
"excellent":--

"One feels in the reading that Thackeray is a peer among his
peers--a sort of elder brother,[A] kindly, appreciative and
tolerant--as he discourses of Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope,
Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith. I know of no greater contrast in
criticism--a contrast, be it said, not to the advantage of the
French critic--than Thackeray's treatment of Pope and that of M.
Taine. What allowance the Englishman makes for the physical ills
that beset the 'gallant little cripple'; with what a gentle hand
he touches the painful places in that poor twisted body! M.
Taine, irritated apparently that Pope will not fit into his
conception of English literature, exhibits the same deformities
almost savagely."

I am sorry that I cannot read this kindliness, this appreciation, this
tolerance, into the Lectures--into those, for instance, of Sterne and
Fielding: that the simile of the "elder brother" carries different
suggestions for Mr. Marzials and for me: and that the lecturer's
attitude is to me less suggestive of a peer among his peers than of a
tall "bobby"--a volunteer constable--determined to warn his polite
hearers what sort of men these were whose books they had hitherto read
unsuspectingly.

And even so--even though the lives and actions of men who lived too
early to know Victorian decency must be held up to shock a crowd in
Willis's Rooms, yet it had been but common generosity to tell the
whole truth. Then the story of Fielding's _Voyage to Lisbon_ might
have touched the heart to sympathy even for the purely fictitious low
comedian whom Thackeray presented: and Sterne's latest letters might
have infused so much pity into the polite audience that they, like his
own Recording Angel, might have blotted out his faults with a tear.
But that was not Thackeray's way. Charlotte Bronte found "a finished
taste and ease" in the Lectures, a "something hig