se to quite noble
heights of feeling and he is able to throw a startling glamour of
romance over certain familiar and recurrent human situations. At his
best there is a grandeur and simplicity of utterance about what his
characters say and an ease and largeness of sympathy about his own
commentaries upon them, which must win admiration even from those most
avid of modern pathology. Without the passion of Balzac, or the
insight of Dostoievsky, or the art of Turgeniev, there is yet, in the
sweetness of Scott's own personality, and in the biblical grandeur of
certain of the scenes he evokes, a quality and a charm which it would
be at once foolish and arbitrary to neglect.

59. THACKERAY. THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND.

Thackeray is a writer who occupies a curious and very interesting
position. Devoid of the noble and romantic sympathies of Scott, and
corrupted to the basic fibres of his being by Early Victorian
snobbishness, he is yet--none can deny it--a powerful creator of
living people and an accomplished and graceful stylist.

Without philosophy, without faith, without moral courage, the uneasy
slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer
worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain
unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre
people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a
convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost
devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy.

The most winning and attractive thing about him is his devotion to the
eighteenth century; a century whose manners he is able to depict in
his large and gracious way without being disturbed by the pressure of
that contemporary vulgarity which finds a too lively response in
something bourgeois and snobbish in his own nature.

Dealing with the eighteenth century he escapes not only from his age
but from himself.

60. CHARLES DICKENS. GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

The compiler has placed in this list only one of Dickens' books for a
somewhat different reason from that which has influenced him in other
cases. All Dickens' novels have a unique value, and such an equal
value, that almost any one of them, chosen at random, can serve as an
example of the rest.

Those who still are not prohibited, by temperamental difficulty or by
some modern fashion, from enjoying the peculiar atmosphere of this
astonishing person's work, will be found reverting to him