ackeray, it led only to compassionate sadness."

A great part of his life, and most of his happiness, lay in love. "Ich
habe auch viel geliebt," he says, and it is a hazardous kind of happiness
that attends great affection. Your capital is always at the mercy of
failures, of death, of jealousy, of estrangement. But he had so much
love to give that he could not but trust those perilous investments.

Other troubles he had that may have been diversions from those. He did
not always keep that manly common sense in regard to criticism, which he
shows in a letter to Mrs. Brookfield. "Did you read the _Spectator's_
sarcastic notice of 'Vanity Fair'? I don't think it is just, but think
Kintoul (Rintoul?) is a very honest man, and rather inclined to deal
severely with his private friends lest he should fall into the other
extreme: to be sure he keeps out of it, I mean the other extreme, very
well."

That is the way to take unfavourable criticisms--not to go declaring that
a man is your enemy because he does not like your book, your ballads,
your idyls, your sermons, what you please. Why cannot people keep
literature and liking apart? Am I bound to think Jones a bad citizen, a
bad man, a bad householder, because his poetry leaves me cold? Need he
regard me as a malevolent green-eyed monster, because I don't want to
read him? Thackeray was not always true in his later years to these
excellent principles. He was troubled about trifles of criticisms and
gossip, _bagatelles_ not worth noticing, still less worth remembering and
recording. Do not let us record them, then.

We cannot expect for Thackeray, we cannot even desire for him, a
popularity like that of Dickens. If ever any man wrote for the people,
it was Dickens. Where can we find such a benefactor, and who has
lightened so many lives with such merriment as he? But Thackeray wrote,
like the mass of authors, for the literary class--for all who have the
sense of style, the delight in the best language. He will endure while
English literature endures, while English civilisation lasts. We cannot
expect all the world to share our affection for this humourist whose
mirth springs from his melancholy. His religion, his education, his life
in this unsatisfying world, are not the life, the education, the religion
of the great majority of human kind. He cannot reach so many ears and
hearts as Shakespeare or Dickens, and some of those whom he reaches will
always and