nglish, from the first
page of his first volume to the last page of his twenty-sixth volume,
is natural, scholarly, pure, incisive, and yet gracefully and easily
modulated--the language of an English gentleman of culture, wit,
knowledge of the world, and consummate ease and self-possession. It is
the direct and trenchant language of Swift: but more graceful, more
flexible, more courteous.

And what is a truly striking fact about Thackeray's mastery of style is
this--that it was perfectly formed from the beginning; that it hardly
ever varied, or developed, or waned in the whole course of his literary
career; that his first venture as a very young man is as finished and
as ripe as his very latest piece, when he died almost in the act of
writing the words--"_and his heart throbbed, with an exquisite bliss_."
This prodigious precocity in style, such uniform perfection of exact
composition, are perhaps without parallel in English literature. At
the age of twenty-six Thackeray wrote _The History of Samuel Titmarsh_
and the _Great Hoggarty Diamond_. It was produced under very
melancholy conditions, in the most unfavourable form of publication,
and it was mangled by editorial necessities. And yet it can still be
read and re-read as one of Thackeray's masterpieces, trifling and
curtailed as it is (for it may be printed in one hundred pages); it is
as full of wit, humour, scathing insight, and fine pathos in the midst
of burlesque, as is _Vanity Fair_ itself. It is already Thackeray in
all his strength, with his "Snobs," his "Nobs," his fierce satire, and
his exquisite style.

Modern romance has no purer, more pathetic, or simpler page than the
tale of the death of poor Samuel Titmarsh's first child. Though it is,
as it deserves to be, a household word, the passage must be quoted here
as a specimen of faultless and beautiful style.

It was not, however, destined that she and her child should inhabit
that little garret. We were to leave our lodgings on Monday morning;
but on Saturday evening the child was seized with convulsions, and all
Sunday the mother watched and prayed for it: but it pleased God to take
the innocent infant from us, and on Sunday, at midnight, it lay a
corpse in its mother's bosom. Amen. We have other children, happy and
well, now round about us, and from the father's heart the memory of
this little thing has almost faded; but I do believe that every day of
her life the mother thinks of her first