Amelia--all
are perfect reproductions of the writer, as are scores of letters
scattered up and down the twenty-six volumes. Nor must we omit, as
part of the style, the author's own illustrations. They are really
part of the book; they assist us to understand the characters; they are
a very important portion of the writer's method. None of our great
writers ever had this double instrument: and Thackeray has used it with
consummate effect. The sketches in _Vanity Fair_ and in _Punch_,
especially the minor thumb-nail drolleries, are delightful--true
caricatures--real portraits of character. It is true they are ill
drawn, often impossible, crude, and almost childish in their
incorrectness and artlessness. But they have in them the soul of a
great caricaturist. They have the Hogarthian touch of a great comic
artist.

One is tempted to enlarge at length on the merits of Thackeray's style,
because it is in his mastery over all the resources of the English
language that he surpasses contemporary prose writers. And it is a
mastery which is equally shown in every form of composition. There is
a famous bit of Byron's about Sheridan to the effect that he had
written the best comedy, made the finest speech, and invented the
drollest farce in the English language. And it is hardly extravagant
to say of Thackeray that, of all the Englishmen of this century, he has
written the best comedy of manners, the best extravaganza, the best
burlesque, the best parody, and the best comic song. And to this some
of his admirers would add--the best lectures, and the best critical
essays. It is of course true that he has never reached or attempted to
reach the gorgeous rhapsodies of De Quincey or the dithyrambic melodies
of Ruskin. But these heaven-born Pegasi cannot be harnessed to the
working vehicles of our streets. The marvel of Thackeray's command
over language is this--that it is unfailing in prose or in verse, in
pathos or in terror, in tragedy or in burlesque, in narrative, in
repartee, or in drollery: and that it never waxes or flags in force and
precision throughout twenty-six full volumes.

Of Thackeray's style--a style that has every quality in perfection:
simplicity, clearness, ease, force, elasticity, and grace--it is
difficult to speak but in terms of unstinted admiration. When we deal
with the substance and effective value of his great books we see that,
although Thackeray holds his own with the best writers of this