s. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they may
be equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a few
striking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints
character, and Dickens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages are
all men, those of Dickens personified oddities. The one is an artist,
the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.
Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the
illustrations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as
we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for Dickens
invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is
perfect, that of Dickens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast
less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.
Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from the
reporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of the
greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more
types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is
marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is
very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had
pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are
masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon
by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never
act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.

Thackeray's style is beyond praise,--so easy, so limpid, showing
everywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture,
it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was natural
to him,--his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond," for example)
being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respects
the most finished example we have of what is called a man of the world.
In the pardonable eulogies which were uttered in the fresh grief at his
loss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked above
Fielding,--a position which no one would have been so eager in
disclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on their
pedestals. Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written in
English since Shakespeare. Of a broader and deeper nature, of a larger
brain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter is
Society. The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common was
R