be questionable; they undoubtedly
headed the army of Comus, and thereby raised the whole standard of
facetious literature. But the defect of this school was its propensity
to take a hilarious or sardonic view, not only of mediaeval romance,
but of quaint old times generally; and one leading embodiment of this
mocking spirit was _Punch_ founded in 1841. A'Beckett's _Comic History
of England_, which ran through many numbers, seems to this generation
a dreary and deleterious specimen of misplaced farce; though
historically it is not quite such bad work as Dickens's _Child's
History of England_, which he meant to be serious. Among Thackeray's
very numerous contributions to _Punch_ are _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures
on English History_, which might well have been consigned to
oblivion, _Rebecca and Rowena_, and _The Prize Novelists_. The
sarcastic and the sentimental temper must always be hostile to each
other; between romance and ridicule the antipathy is fundamental; and
although one regrets that he ever wrote _Rebecca and Rowena_, the
melodramatic novels of Bulwer-Lytton were fair enough game for the
parodist. However, it is certain that in his earlier writings
Thackeray did much to laugh away the novel of mediaeval chivalry; and
while we think he often carried his irreverent jocosity much too far,
since after all chivalry is better than cockneyism, we may award him
the very high honour of becoming, latterly, one of the founders of a
new and admirable historical school in England.

The eighteenth century was always Thackeray's favourite period; he
liked the rational, unpretentious tone of its best literature, its
practical politics and tolerance, its common sense, and its habit of
keeping very close, in art as in action, to the realities of the world
as we find it. Swift is the most unromantic of any writer that
possessed great imaginative faculty; Defoe was a master of minute
life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings
are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished
denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy,
large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery,
loved to banter the parsons, to bring fops and boobies upon his stage,
and to place in contrast the wide difference that then separated
manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to
Fielding than to any other single literary ancestor; but all these
influences were most