but the element of romance,
which furnishes the light and music and fragrance of love, is
inconspicuous. The hero, after ten years of devotion to a young woman, a
paragon of beauty, finally marries her mother, and ends with a few pious
observations concerning Heaven's mercy and his own happy lot. Such an
ending seems disappointing, almost bizarre, in view of the romantic novels
to which we are accustomed; but we must remember that Thackeray's purpose
was to paint life as he saw it, and that in life men and things often take
a different way from that described in romances. As we grow acquainted with
Thackeray's characters, we realize that no other ending was possible to his
story, and conclude that his plot, like his style, is perhaps as near
perfection as a realistic novelist can ever come.

_Vanity Fair_ (1847--1848) is the best known of Thackeray's novels. It was
his first great work, and was intended to express his own views of the
social life about him, and to protest against the overdrawn heroes of
popular novels. He takes for his subject that Vanity Fair to which
Christian and Faithful were conducted on their way to the Heavenly City, as
recorded in _Pilgrim's Progress_. In this fair there are many different
booths, given over to the sale of "all sorts of vanities," and as we go
from one to another we come in contact with "juggling, cheats, games,
plays, fools, apes, knaves, rogues, and that of every kind." Evidently this
is a picture of one side of social life; but the difference between Bunyan
and Thackeray is simply this,--that Bunyan made Vanity Fair a small
incident in a long journey, a place through which most of us pass on our
way to better things; while Thackeray, describing high society in his own
day, makes it a place of long sojourn, wherein his characters spend the
greater part of their lives. Thackeray styles this work "a novel without a
hero." The whole action of the story, which is without plot or development,
revolves about two women,--Amelia, a meek creature of the milk-and-water
type, and Becky Sharp, a keen, unprincipled intriguer, who lets nothing
stand in the way of her selfish desire to get the most out of the fools who
largely constitute society. On the whole, it is the most powerful but not
the most wholesome of Thackeray's works.

In his second important novel, _Pendennis_ (1849-1850), we have a
continuation of the satire on society begun in _Vanity Fair_. This novel,
which the beginner sh