side of life. He saw the bright and pure side: he
loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius
worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and
the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise,
of that just vision of _chiaroscuro_, which we find in the greatest
masters of the human heart. This limitation of his genius has been
visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand. And such as it is, he must
bear it.

The place of Thackeray in English literature will always be determined
by his _Vanity Fair_: which will be read, we may confidently predict,
as long as _Tom Jones_, _Clarissa_, _Tristram Shandy_, _The Antiquary_,
and _Pickwick_. But all the best of his pieces, even the smaller _jeux
d'esprit_, may be read with delight again and again by young and old.
And of the best are--_Esmond_, _The Newcomes_, _Barry Lyndon_, the
_Book of Snobs_, the _Hoggarty Diamond_, some of the _Burlesques_ and
_Christmas Books_, and the _English Humourists_. Of these, _Esmond_
has every quality of a great book, except its artificial form, its
excessive elaboration of historical colouring, and its unsavoury plot.
Beatrix Esmond is almost as wonderful a creation as Becky Sharp;
though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than
that incorrigible minx. The _Newcomes_, if in some ways the most
genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of _Vanity
Fair_. And if _Barry Lyndon_ has this power, it is an awful picture of
cruelty and meanness. The _Book of Snobs_ and the _Hoggarty Diamond_
were each a kind of prelude to _Vanity Fair_, and both contain some of
its essential marks of pathos and of power. It is indeed strange to us
now to remember that both of these books, written with such finished
mastery of hand and full of such passages of wit and insight, could
have been published for years before the world had recognised that it
had a new and consummate writer before it. The _Book of Snobs_ indeed
may truly be said to have seriously improved the public opinion of the
age, and to have given a death-blow to many odious forms of sycophancy
and affectation which passed unrebuked in England fifty years ago. And
the _Burlesque Romances_ and the _English Humourists_ have certainly
assisted in forming the public taste and in promoting a sound criticism
of our standard fiction.

Charlotte Bronte dedicated her _Jane Eyre_, in 1847, to William
Makep