your laughter never forced; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of
the preacher. Your funny people--your Costigans and Fokers--were
not mere characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic
masks. Behind each the human heart was beating; and ever and again
we were allowed to see the features of the man.

Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like
another, but a constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a
repeated echo of its laughter and its complaint. Others have
written, and not written badly, with the stolid professional
regularity of the clerk at his desk; you, like the Scholar Gipsy,
might have said that "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill."
There are, it will not surprise you, some honourable women and a few
men who call you a cynic; who speak of "the withered world of
Thackerayan satire;" who think your eyes were ever turned to the
sordid aspects of life--to the mother-in-law who threatens to "take
away her silver bread-basket;" to the intriguer, the sneak, the
termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies
of this world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with
life, not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon
because there are snakes in his Natural History. Had you not
impaled certain noxious human insects, you would have better pleased
Mr. Ruskin; had you confined yourself to such performances, you
would have been more dear to the Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.

You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a
doll, but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either
of Lady Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can
pardon you Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to
forgive you Emmy Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man does not