selection; the
chapter on 'Some Country Snobs' is an apt choosing; the celebrated
'Essay on George IV' demonstrates Thackeray in a very different mood.
The 'Fall of Becky Sharp,' taken from 'Vanity Fair,' has not been
included without forethought.

Of Thackeray's poems, Chesterton has included the most significant, and
not without due 'The Cane-Bottomed Chair' finds a prominent place.

Enough has been said to show that Chesterton is not a critic of
Thackeray who has no discrimination in choosing from his works. He knows
what Thackeray was, wherein lay his strength and weakness. He has added
a worthy companion to his fuller works on Browning and Dickens.

_Chapter Four_

BROWNING

It will be convenient for our purpose to adhere as closely as possible
to the order of Chesterton's book. It is a hard task to do justice to
Browning even in a long book; the task is not simplified when, in a
chapter, it is hoped to give a criticism of an intricate criticism of
Browning.

There are two ways to approach such a task: The first is to take the
book as a whole and write a review of it, which is a method liable to a
superficiality; the second is to take such a work chapter by chapter,
and to piece the various criticisms into an ordered whole. This I have
attempted to do. I make no attempt to criticize the method of
Chesterton's approach to Browning, or his combination of the effect of
his life on his work; rather I wish to take what the critic says and
comment on his remarks.

There is undoubtedly a fundamental difference between Browning and
Dickens which is at once clear to any critic of these two writers.
Dickens was, as I have said in an earlier chapter, born at the
psychological moment. Browning happened to be born early in the
nineteenth century. I cannot see that it would have mattered had he been
born at the beginning of the twentieth. His early life, unlike Dickens,
was normal, but it did not affect Browning adversely. Had Dickens' life
been uneventful, I think it not improbable that his literary output
would have been commonplace instead of, as nearly as possible, divine.

There is no particular account of Browning's family, which was probably
a typical middle-class family, which is to say that they were, like many
thousands of their kind, lovers of the normal--a very good reason why
later Browning should have acquired a love for the grotesque, which many
people quite wrongly define as the abnormal.

The