oduced? Now Goldsmith is one
of the most difficult persons in the whole range of literature to treat,
from the motley of his merits and his weaknesses. Yet Thackeray has
achieved the adventure here. In short, throughout the book, he is
invaluable as a critic, if not impeccable in criticism. His faults, and
the causes of them, are obvious, separable, negligible: his merits (the
chief of them, as usual, the constant shower of happy and illuminative
phrase) as rare in quality as they are abundant in quantity.

The lectures on _The English Humourists_ must have been composed very much
_pari passu_ with _Esmond_; they were being delivered while it was being
finished, and it was published just as the author was setting off to
re-deliver them in America. _The Four Georges_ were not regularly taken in
hand till some years later, when _The Newcomes_ was finished or finishing,
and when fresh material was wanted for the second American trip. But there
exists a very remarkable _scenario_ of them--as it may be almost called--a
full decade older, in the shape of a _satura_ of verse and prose
contributed to _Punch_ on October 11, 1845; which has accordingly been
kept back from its original associates to be inserted here. All things
considered, it gives the lines which are followed in the later lectures
with remarkable precision: and it is not at all improbable that Thackeray
actually, though not of necessity consciously, took it for head-notes.

No book of his has been so violently attacked both at the time of its
appearance and since. Nor--for, as the reader must have seen long ago, the
present writer, though proud to be called a Thackerayan stalwart, is not a
Thackerayan "know-nothing", a "Thackeray-right-or-wrong" man--is there any
that exposes itself more to attack. From the strictly literary side,
indeed, it has the advantage of _The Book of Snobs_: for it is nowhere
unequal, and exhibits its author's unmatched power of historical-artistic
imagination or reconstruction in almost the highest degree possible. But
in other respects it certainly does show the omission "to erect a sconce
on Drumsnab". There was (it has already been hinted at in connexion with
the Eastern Journey) a curious innocence about Thackeray. It may be that,
like the Hind,

He feared no danger for he knew no sin;

but the absence of fear with him implied an apparent ignoring of danger,
which is a danger in itself. Nobody who has even passed Responsion