century,
he cannot be said to hold the same manifest crown of supremacy. One of
his strongest claims is the vast quantity and variety of his best work,
and the singularly small proportion of inferior work. Fielding himself
wrote pitiful trash when he became, as he said, a mere "hackney
writer"; Richardson's _Grandison_ overcomes most readers; Scott at last
broke down; Carlyle, Disraeli, Dickens, and Ruskin have written many
things which "we do not turn over by day and turn over by night," to
put it as gently as one can. But Thackeray is hardly ever below
himself in form, and rarely is he below himself in substance.
_Pendennis_ is certainly much inferior to _Vanity Fair_, and _Philip_
is much inferior to _Pendennis_. _The Virginians_ is far behind
_Esmond_. But of the more important books not one can be called in any
sense a failure unless it be _Lovel the Widower_, and _The Adventures
of Philip_.

Thackeray's masterpiece beyond question is _Vanity Fair_--which as a
comedy of the manners of contemporary life is quite the greatest
achievement in English literature since _Tom Jones_. It has not the
consummate plot of _Tom Jones_; it has not the breadth, the
Shakespearean jollity, the genial humanity of the great "prose Homer";
it has no such beautiful character as Sophia Western. It is not the
overflowing of a warm, genial, sociable soul, such as that of Henry
Fielding. But _Vanity Fair_ may be put beside _Tom Jones_ for variety
of character, intense reality, ingenuity of incident, and profusion of
wit, humour, and invention. It is even better written than _Tom
Jones_; has more pathos and more tragedy; and is happily free from the
nauseous blots into which Harry Fielding was betrayed by the taste of
his age. It is hard to say what scene in _Vanity Fair_, what part,
what character, rests longest in the memory. Is it the home of the
Sedleys and the Osbornes, is it Queen's Crawley, or the incidents at
Brussels, or at Gaunt House:--is it George Osborne, or Jos, or Miss
Crawley, the Major or the Colonel,--is it Lord Steyne or Rebecca? All
are excellent, all seem perfect in truth, in consistency, in contrast.

The great triumph of _Vanity Fair_--the great triumph of modern
fiction--is Becky Sharp: a character which will ever stand in the very
foremost rank of English literature, if not with Falstaff and Shylock,
then with Squire Western, Uncle Toby, Mr. Primrose, Jonathan Oldbuck,
and Sam Weller. There is no char