one or two might be named of either sort, whose works,
though they have that in them which will insure to them a long life,
will become from year to year less valuable and less venerable, because
their authors have either scorned or have not known that common ground
of language on which the author and his readers should stand together.
My purport here is only with Thackeray, and I say that he stands always
on that common ground. He quarrels with none of the laws. As the lady
who is most attentive to conventional propriety may still have her own
fashion of dress and her own mode of speech, so had Thackeray very
manifestly his own style; but it is one the correctness of which has
never been impugned.

I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one
observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's
written language. Only, where shall we find an example of such
perfection? Always easy, always lucid, always correct, we may find them;
but who is the writer, easy, lucid, and correct, who has not impregnated
his writing with something of that personal flavour which we call
mannerism? To speak of authors well known to all readers--Does not _The
Rambler_ taste of Johnson; _The Decline and Fall_, of Gibbon; _The
Middle Ages_, of Hallam; _The History of England_, of Macaulay; and _The
Invasion of the Crimea_, of Kinglake? Do we not know the elephantine
tread of _The Saturday_, and the precise toe of _The Spectator_? I have
sometimes thought that Swift has been nearest to the mark of
any,--writing English and not writing Swift. But I doubt whether an
accurate observer would not trace even here the "mark of the beast."
Thackeray, too, has a strong flavour of Thackeray. I am inclined to
think that his most besetting sin in style,--the little earmark by which
he is most conspicuous,--is a certain affected familiarity. He indulges
too frequently in little confidences with individual readers, in which
pretended allusions to himself are frequent. "What would you do? what
would you say now, if you were in such a position?" he asks. He
describes this practice of his in the preface to _Pendennis_. "It is a
sort of confidential talk between writer and reader.... In the course of
his volubility the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay bare his own
weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities." In the short contributions to
periodicals on which he tried his 'prentice hand, such addresses and
conversations were natu