what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a "bite."[71] Here
Thackeray has borrowed not only Steele's voice, but his very trick of
speech. It is, however, a fresh instance of the "tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive," that although this
pseudo-_Spectator_ is stated to have been printed "exactly as those
famous journals were printed" for eighteenth-century breakfast-tables,
it could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have deceived the
contemporary elect. For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin epigraph,
unluckily appended an English translation,--a concession to the country
gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately abstained,
holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison's own phrase)
"words to the wise," of no concern to unlearned persons.[72]

Notes:

[70] _Esmond_, Book ii, chap, ii.

[71] _Ib_. Book iii, chap, iii.

[72] _Spectator_, No. 221, November 13, 1711.


This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of would-be perfect
imitation. But it also serves to bring us finally to the vocabulary of
_Esmond_. As to this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes been
advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a high journalistic
authority, that "no man, woman, or child in _Esmond_, ever says anything
that he or she might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne." This is
one of those extreme utterances in which enthusiasm, losing its head,
invites contradiction. Thackeray professedly "copied the language of