e"; published other essays on Livy,
Carlyle, and Mill; professor of esthetics at the Ecole des
Beaux Arts in 1864; published a book on the Pyrenees in
1855, one on Italy in 1866, and one on England 1872; his
"History of English Literature," his masterpiece, published
in 1864-65; "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine"
1875-90; elected to the French Academy in 1878.

I

THACKERAY AS A SATIRIST[7]

The novel of manners in England multiplies, and for this there are
several reasons: first, it is born there, and every plant thrives well
in its own soil; secondly, it is a natural outlet: there is no music
in England as in Germany, or conversation as in France; and men who
must think and feel find in it a means of feeling and thinking. On the
other hand, women take part in it with eagerness; amidst the
stagnation of gallantry and the coldness of religion, it gives scope
for imagination and dreams. Finally, by its minute details and
practical counsels, it opens up a career to the precise and moral
mind. The critic thus is, as it were, swamped in this copiousness; he
must select in order to grasp the whole, and confine himself to a few
in order to embrace all.

[Footnote 7: From Book V, Chapter II of "The History of English
Literature." Translated by H. van Laun.]

In this crowd two men have appeared of superior talent, original and
contrasted, popular on the same grounds, ministers to the same cause,
moralists in comedy and drama, defenders of natural sentiments against
social institutions; who, by the precision of their pictures, the
depth of their observations, the succession and bitterness of their
attacks, have renewed, with other views and in another style, the old
combative spirit of Swift and Fielding.

One, more ardent, more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an
impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric
prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic
invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the
boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque
familiarity of his caricatures, he has displayed all the forces and
weaknesses of an artist, all the audacities, all the successes, and
all the oddities of the imagination.

The other, more contained, better informed and stronger, a lover of
moral dissertations, a counselor of the public, a sort of lay
preacher, less bent on defending the poor, more bent