etely
understood him.

The book is a tribute by a great writer to a greater writer, by a great
man to a great man, by a complex personality to a complex personality;
above all it is a tribute by a lover of the things of the 'doorstep' to
a writer who has made the doorstep and the street the road to heaven,
because the beings who pass along have been made immortal.

When the critics of Dickens meet at the inn there will be none more
worthy of a place close to the Master Writer than Chesterton.

_Chapter Three_

THACKERAY

There are no doubt thousands of people who would be annoyed to be
thought the reverse of well read who nevertheless know Thackeray only as
a name. They know that he was a really great English novelist--they may
even know that he lived as a contemporary of Dickens--but they do not
know a line of any of his works.

In lesser manner Dickens is unknown to very many people of the present
day who could tell you intelligently of every modern book that is
produced. The reason is, I think, one that is not so generally thought
of as might be expected.

It is often said that Thackeray and Dickens are out of date, that they
have had their day, that this era of tube trains and other abominations
cannot fall into the background of lumbering stage coaches.

This is, I think, a profound and grave error. It is an error because it
presupposes that human interest changes with the advent of different
means of transport: that Squeers is no longer of interest because he
would now travel to Yorkshire by the Great Northern Railway and would
have lunch in a luncheon car instead of inside a four-horse stage coach.

The fundamental reason that modern people do not read these great
authors is that they are not encouraged to do so. The very best way to
instil a love of Thackeray into the modern world is to make the modern
world read just so much of him that its voracious appetite is sharpened
to wish for more.

In an altogether admirable series of the masters of literature Thackeray
finds a place, and treatment of him is left to Chesterton, who writes a
fine introductory 'Biography' and then takes picked passages from his
writings. This is, I think, the most useful means possible of
popularizing an author. It requires a good deal of pluck in these days
to sit down and steadily pursue a way through a long book of Thackeray
unless it has been proved, by the perusal of a selected passage, that
riches in the book w