In this a great subject is discussed which would be too long for these
pages; but I think that there now exists a feeling that literature can
herself, for herself, produce a rank as effective as any that a Queen's
minister can bestow. Surely it would be a repainting of the lily, an
adding a flavour to the rose, a gilding of refined gold to create
to-morrow a Lord Viscount Tennyson, a Baron Carlyle, or a Right
Honourable Sir Robert Browning. And as for pay and pension, the less the
better of it for any profession, unless so far as it may be payment made
for work done. Then the higher the payment the better, in literature as
in all other trades. It may be doubted even whether a special rank of
its own be good for literature, such as that which is achieved by the
happy possessors of the forty chairs of the Academy in France. Even
though they had an angel to make the choice,--which they have not,--that
angel would do more harm to the excluded than good to the selected.

_Pendennis_, _Esmond_, and _The Newcomes_ followed _Vanity Fair_,--not
very quickly indeed, always at an interval of two years,--in 1850, 1852,
and 1854. As I purpose to devote a separate short chapter, or part of a
chapter, to each of these, I need say nothing here of their special
merits or demerits. _Esmond_ was brought out as a whole. The others
appeared in numbers. "He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." It is
a mode of pronunciation in literature by no means very articulate, but
easy of production and lucrative. But though easy it is seductive, and
leads to idleness. An author by means of it can raise money and
reputation on his book before he has written it, and when the pang of
parturition is over in regard to one part, he feels himself entitled to
a period of ease because the amount required for the next division will
occupy him only half the month. This to Thackeray was so alluring that
the entirety of the final half was not always given to the task. His