fail in his consummate mastery of style; few can be said to be irksome
to read, to re-read, and to linger over in the reading.

This mastery over style--a style at once simple, pure, nervous,
flexible, pathetic, and graceful--places Thackeray amongst the very
greatest masters of English prose, and undoubtedly as the most certain
and faultless of all the prose writers of the Victorian Age. Without
saying that he has ever reached quite to the level of some lyrical and
apocalyptic descants that we may find in Carlyle and in Ruskin,
Thackeray has never fallen into the faults of violence and turgidity
which their warmest admirers are bound to confess in many a passage
from these our two prose-poets. Carlyle is often grotesque; Macaulay
can be pompous; Disraeli, Bulwer, Dickens, are often slovenly and
sometimes bombastic; George Eliot is sometimes pedantic, and Ruskin has
been stirred into hysterics. But Thackeray's English, from the first
page of his first volume to the last page of his twenty-sixth volume,
is natural, scholarly, pure, incisive, and yet gracefully and easily
modulated--the language of an English gentleman of culture, wit,
knowledge of the world, and consummate ease and self-possession. It is
the direct and trenchant language of Swift: but more graceful, more
flexible, more courteous.

And what is a truly striking fact about Thackeray's mastery of style is
this--that it was perfectly formed from the beginning; that it hardly
ever varied, or developed, or waned in the whole course of his literary
career; that his first venture as a very young man is as finished and
as ripe as his very latest piece, when he died almost in the act of
writing the words--"_and his heart throbbed, with an exquisite bliss_."
This prodigious precocity in style, such uniform perfection of exact
composition, are perhaps without parallel in English literature. At