s play for an irony as keen
and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English
world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to
return to Thackeray's vision of his own contemporaneous English world at
the first opportunity. We have not done so yet; but after we have
fortified ourselves with a course of Scott and Dickens, we are confident
of being able to bear up under the heaviest-handed satire of _Vanity
Fair_. As for _The Luck of Barry Lyndon_ and _The Yellowplush Papers_,
and such like, they have never ceased to have their prime delight for
us. But their proportion is quite large enough to survive from any
author for any reader; as we are often saying, it is only in bits that
authors survive; their resurrection is not by the whole body, but here
and there a perfecter fragment. Most of our present likes and dislikes
are of the period when you say people begin to stiffen in their tastes.
We could count the authors by the score who have become our favorites in
that period, and those we have dropped are almost as many. It is not
necessary to say who they all are, but we may remark that we still read,
and read, and read again the poetry of Keats, and that we no longer read
the poetry of Alexander Smith. But it is through the growth of the truly
great upon his mature perception that the aging reader finds novel
excellences in them. It was only the other day that we picked up
Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, and realized in it, from a chance page or
two, a sardonic quality of insurpassable subtlety and reach. This was
something quite new to us in it. We had known the terrible pathos of the
story, its immeasurable tragedy, but that deadly, quiet, pitiless,
freezing irony of a witness holding himself aloof from its course, and
losing, for that page or two, the moralist in the mere observer, was a
revelation that had come to that time of life in us when you think the
tastes stiffen and one refuses new pleasures because they are new."

Our visitor yawned visibly, audibly. "And what is all this you have been
saying? You have made yourself out an extraordinary example of what may
be done by guarding against the stiffening of the tastes after the end
of second youth. But have you proved that there is no such danger? Or
was your idea simply to celebrate yourself? At moments I fancied
something like that."

We owned the stroke with an indulgent smile. "No, not exactly that. The
truth is we have be