f pure literary English. No
English writer of such literary genius slips so often into vulgarisms,
solecisms, archaisms, and mere slip-shod gossip. But these are after
all quite minor defects. His books, even his worst books, abound in
epigrams, pictures, characters, and scenes of rare wit. His painting
of parliamentary life in England has neither equal nor rival. And his
reflections on English society and politics reveal the insight of vast
experience and profound genius.

V

W. M. THACKERAY

The literary career of William Makepeace Thackeray has not a few
special features of its own that it is interesting to note at once. Of
all the more eminent writers of the Victorian Age, his life was the
shortest: he died in 1863 at the age of fifty-two, the age of
Shakespeare. His literary career of twenty-six years was shorter than
that of Carlyle, of Macaulay, Disraeli, Dickens, Trollope, George
Eliot, Froude, or Ruskin. It opened with the reign of the Queen,
almost in the very year of _Pickwick_, whose author stood beside his
grave and lived and wrote for some years more. But these twenty-six
years of Thackeray's era of production were full of wonderful activity,
and have left us as many volumes of rich and varied genius. And the
most striking feature of all is this--that in these twenty-six full
volumes in so many modes, prose, verse, romance, parody, burlesque,
essay, biography, criticism, there are hardly more than one or two
which can be put aside as worthless and as utter failures; very few
fail in his consummate mastery of style; few can be said to be irksome
to read, to re-read, and to linger over in the reading.

This mastery over style--a style at once simple, pure, nervous,
flexible, pathetic, and graceful--places Thackeray amongst the very
greatest masters of English prose, and undoubtedly as the most certain
and faultless of all the prose writers of the Victorian Age. Without
saying that he has ever reached quite to the level of some lyrical and
apocalyptic descants that we may find in Carlyle and in Ruskin,
Thackeray has never fallen into the faults of violence and turgidity
which their warmest admirers are bound to confess in many a passage
from these our two prose-poets. Carlyle is often grotesque; Macaulay
can be pompous; Disraeli, Bulwer, Dickens, are often slovenly and
sometimes bombastic; George Eliot is sometimes pedantic, and Ruskin has
been stirred into hysterics. But Thackeray's E