English writer of such literary genius slips so often into vulgarisms,
solecisms, archaisms, and mere slip-shod gossip. But these are after
all quite minor defects. His books, even his worst books, abound in
epigrams, pictures, characters, and scenes of rare wit. His painting
of parliamentary life in England has neither equal nor rival. And his
reflections on English society and politics reveal the insight of vast
experience and profound genius.




V

W. M. THACKERAY

The literary career of William Makepeace Thackeray has not a few
special features of its own that it is interesting to note at once. Of
all the more eminent writers of the Victorian Age, his life was the
shortest: he died in 1863 at the age of fifty-two, the age of
Shakespeare. His literary career of twenty-six years was shorter than
that of Carlyle, of Macaulay, Disraeli, Dickens, Trollope, George
Eliot, Froude, or Ruskin. It opened with the reign of the Queen,
almost in the very year of _Pickwick_, whose author stood beside his
grave and lived and wrote for some years more. But these twenty-six
years of Thackeray's era of production were full of wonderful activity,
and have left us as many volumes of rich and varied genius. And the
most striking feature of all is this--that in these twenty-six full
volumes in so many modes, prose, verse, romance, parody, burlesque,
essay, biography, criticism, there are hardly more than one or two
which can be put aside as worthless and as utter failures; very few