eading on the fancy, or rather
memory of his readers from one set of circumstances to another by the
seeming chances and coincidences of common life, as an artist leads the
spectator's eye through the subject of his picture by a skilful
repetition of colour. This is why it is impossible to quote from his
book with any justice to it. The whole growth of the narrative is so
matted and interwoven together with tendril-like links and bindings,
that there is no detaching a flower with sufficient length of stalk to
exhibit it to advantage. There is that mutual dependence in his
characters which is the first requisite in painting every-day life: no
one is stuck on a separate pedestal--no one is sitting for his portrait.
There may be one exception--we mean Sir Pitt Crawley, senior; it is
possible, nay, we hardly doubt, that this baronet was closer drawn from
individual life than anybody else in the book; but granting that fact,
the animal was so unique an exception, that we wonder so shrewd an
artist could stick him into a gallery so full of our familiars. The
scenes in Germany, we can believe, will seem to many readers of an
English book hardly less extravagantly absurd--grossly and gratuitously
overdrawn; but the initiated will value them as containing some of the
keenest strokes of truth and humour that "Vanity Fair" exhibits, and not
enjoy them the less for being at our neighbour's expense. For the
thorough appreciation of the chief character they are quite
indispensable too. The whole course of the work may be viewed as the
_Wander-Jahre_ of a far cleverer female, _Wilhelm Meister_. We have
watched her in the ups-and-downs of life--among the humble, the
fashionable, the great, and the pious--and found her ever new, yet ever
the same; but still Becky among the students was requisite to complete
the full measure of our admiration.

"Jane Eyre," as a work, and one of equal popularity, is, in almost every
respect, a total contrast to "Vanity Fair." The characters and events,
though some of them masterly in conception, are coined expressly for the
purpose of bringing out great effects. The hero and heroine are beings
both so singularly unattractive that the reader feels they can have no
vocation in the novel but to be brought together; and they do things
which, though not impossible, lie utterly beyond the bounds of
probability. On this account a short sketch of the plan seems requisite;
not but what it is a plan familiar enoug