ich Mr. Thackeray can use slang words, we seem
especially to detect the university man. Snob, swell, buck, gent,
fellow, fogy--these, and many more such expressive appellatives, not yet
sanctioned by the dictionary, Mr. Thackeray employs more frequently, we
believe, than any other living writer, and yet always with
unexceptionable taste. In so doing he is conscious, no doubt, of the
same kind of security that permits Oxford and Cambridge men, and even,
as we can testify, Oxford and Cambridge clergymen, to season their
conversation with similar words--namely, the evident air of educated
manliness with which they can be introduced, and which, however rough
the guise, no one can mistake. In the use of the words genteel, vulgar,
female, and the like--words which men diffident of their own breeding
are observed not to risk; as well as in the art of alternating
gracefully between the noun lady and the noun woman, the Scylla and
Charybdis, if we may say so, of shy talkers--Mr. Thackeray is also a
perfect master, commanding his language in such cases with an
unconscious ease, not unlike that which enables the true English
gentleman he is so fond of portraying, either to name titled personages
of his acquaintance without seeming a tuft-hunter, or to refrain from
naming them without the affectation of radicalism. In Mr. Dickens, of
course, we have the same perfect taste and propriety; but in him the
result appears to arise, if we may so express ourselves, rather from the
keen and feminine sensibility of a fine genius, whose instinct is always
for the pure and beautiful, than from the self-possession of a mind
correct under any circumstances by discipline and sure habit. Where Mr.
Dickens is not exerting himself, that is, in passages of mere equable
narrative or description, where there is nothing to move or excite him,
his style, as we have already said, seems to us more careless and
languid than that of Mr. Thackeray; sometimes, indeed, a whole page is
only redeemed from weakness by those little touches of wit, and those
humorous turns of conception which he knows so well how to sprinkle over
it. It is due to Mr. Dickens to state, however, that in this respect his
"Copperfield" is one of his most pleasing productions, and a decided
improvement on its predecessor "Dombey." Not only is the spirit of the
book more gentle and mellow, but the style is more continuous and
careful, with fewer of those recurring tricks of expression, the