Nay, Mr. Henry Esmond might pass for either, if arrayed in
appropriate costume.

To treat a hero with humour is difficult in romance, all but
impossible. Hence the heroes are rarely our friends, except in
Fielding, or, now and then, in Thackeray. No book is so full of
friends as the novel that has no hero, but has Rawdon Crawley,
Becky, Lady Jane, Mr. Jim Crawley, MacMurdo, Mrs. Major O'Dowd, and
the rest. Even Dobbin is too much the hero to be admitted among
our most kindly acquaintances. So unlucky are heroes that we know
Squire Western and the Philosopher Square and Parson Adams far
better than even that unheroic hero, Tom Jones, or Joseph Andrews.
The humour of Fielding and his tenderness make Amelia and Sophia
far more sure of our hearts than, let us say, Rowena, or the Fair
Maid of Perth, or Flora MacIvor, or Rose Bradwardine. It is humour
that makes Mr. Collins immortal, and Mrs. Bennett, and Emma; while
a multitude of nice girls in fiction, good girls too, are as dead
as Queen Tiah.

Perhaps, after all, this theory explains why it is so very hard to
recall with vividness the persons of our later fiction. Humour is
not the strong point of novelists to-day. There may be amateurs
who know Mr. Howells's characters as their elders know Sophia and
Amelia and Catherine Seyton--there may be. To the old reader of
romance, however earnestly he keeps up with modern fiction, the
salt of life seems often lacking in its puppets or its persons.
Among the creations of living men and women I, for one, feel that I
have two friends at least across the sea, Master Thomas Sawyer and
his companion, Huckleberry Finn. If these are not real boys, then
Dr. Farrar's Eric IS a real boy; I cannot put it stronger. There