really do occur in this life. The battle of
Waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but, as far as regards the story,
it brings about only one death and one bankruptcy, which might either of
them have happened in a hundred other ways. Otherwise the tale runs on,
with little exception, in that humdrum course of daily monotony, out of
which some people coin materials to act, and others excuses to doze,
just as their dispositions may be.

It is this reality which is at once the charm and the misery here. With
all these unpretending materials it is one of the most amusing, but also
one of the most distressing books we have read for many a long year. We
almost long for a little exaggeration and improbability to relieve us of
that sense of dead truthfulness which weighs down our hearts, not for
the Amelias and Georges of the story, but for poor kindred human nature.
In one light this truthfulness is even an objection. With few exceptions
the personages are too like our every-day selves and neighbours to draw
any distinct moral from. We cannot see our way clearly. Palliations of
the bad and disappointments in the good are perpetually obstructing our
judgment, by bringing what should decide it too close to that common
standard of experience in which our only rule of opinion is charity. For
it is only in fictitious characters which are highly coloured for one
definite object, or in notorious personages viewed from a distance, that
the course of the true moral can be seen to run straight--once bring the
individual with his life and circumstances closely before you, and it is
lost to the mental eye in the thousand pleas and witnesses, unseen and
unheard before, which rise up to overshadow it. And what are all these
personages in "Vanity Fair" but feigned names for our own beloved
friends and acquaintances, seen under such a puzzling cross-light of
good in evil, and evil in good, of sins and sinnings against, of little
to be praised virtues, and much to be excused vices, that we cannot
presume to moralise upon them--not even to judge them,--content to
exclaim sorrowfully with the old prophet, "Alas! my brother!" Every
actor on the crowded stage of "Vanity Fair" represents some type of that
perverse mixture of humanity in which there is ever something not wholly
to approve or to condemn. There is the desperate devotion of a fond
heart to a false object, which we cannot respect; there is the vain,
weak man, half good and half bad, who is