oralist and reformer, and the king
of satire, all the weapons of which he managed with perfect skill. He had
a rapier for aristocratic immunities of evil, arrows to transfix
prescriptions and shams; and with snobs (we must change the figure) he
played as a cat does with a mouse, torturing and then devouring. In the
words of Miss Bronte, "he was the first social regenerator of the day, the
very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the
warped system of things." But this was his chief and glorious strength: in
the truest sense, he was a satirist and a humorist, but not a novelist; he
could not create character. His dramatic persons do not speak for
themselves; he tells us what they are and do. His mission seems to have
been to arraign and demolish evil rather than to applaud good, and thus he
enlists our sinless anger as crusaders rather than our sympathy as
philanthropists. In Dickens we are sometimes disposed to skip a little, in
our ardor, to follow the plot and find the denouement. In Thackeray we
read every word, for it is the philosophy we want; the plot and personages
are secondary, as indeed he considered them; for he often tells us, in the
time of greatest depression of his hero, that it will all come out right
at the end,--that Philip will marry Charlotte, and have a good income,
while the poor soul is wrestling with the _res augusta domi_. Dickens and
Thackeray seemed to draw from each other in their later works; the former
philosophizing more in his _Little Dorrit_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, and
the latter attempting more of the descriptive in _The Newcomes_ and
_Philip_. Of minor pieces we may mention his _Rebecca_ and _Rowena_, and
his _Kickleburys on the Rhine_; his _Essay on Thunder_ and _Small Beer_;
his _Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, in 1846, and his
published collection of smaller sketches called _The Roundabout Papers_.
That Thackeray was fully conscious of the dignity of his functions may be
gathered from his own words in _Henry Esmond_. "I would have history
familiar rather than heroic, and think Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding.
[and, we may add, Mr. Thackeray,] will give our children a much better
idea of the manners of that age in England than the _Court Gazette_ and
the newspapers which we get thence." At his death he left an unfinished
novel, entitled _Dennis Duval_. A gifted daughter, who was his kind
amanuensis. Miss ANNE E. THACKERAY, has written several inter