em be ever so
beautiful, can be silly and sly? Why pour philosophy out of the mouth of
a fashionable young gentleman like Pelham, seeing that young gentlemen
of that sort rarely, or we may say never, talk after that fashion? Why
make a housebreaker a gallant charming young fellow, the truth being
that housebreakers as a rule are as objectionable in their manners as
they are in their morals? Thackeray's mind had in truth worked in this
way, and he had become a satirist. That had been all very well for
_Fraser_ and _Punch_; but when his satire was continued through a long
novel, in twenty-four parts, readers,--who do in truth like the heroic
better than the wicked,--began to declare that this writer was no
novelist, but only a cynic.

Thence the question arises what a novel should be,--which I will
endeavour to discuss very shortly in a later chapter. But this special
fault was certainly found with _Vanity Fair_ at the time. Heroines
should not only be beautiful, but should be endowed also with a quasi
celestial grace,--grace of dignity, propriety, and reticence. A heroine
should hardly want to be married, the arrangement being almost too
mundane,--and, should she be brought to consent to undergo such bond,
because of its acknowledged utility, it should be at some period so
distant as hardly to present itself to the mind as a reality. Eating and
drinking should be altogether indifferent to her, and her clothes should
be picturesque rather than smart, and that from accident rather than
design. Thackeray's Amelia does not at all come up to the description
here given. She is proud of having a lover, constantly declaring to
herself and to others that he is "the greatest and the best of
men,"--whereas the young gentleman is, in truth, a very little man. She
is not at all indifferent as to her finery, nor, as we see incidentally,
to enjoying her suppers at Vauxhall. She is anxious to be married,--and
as soon as possible. A hero too should be dignified and of a noble
presence; a man who, though he may be as poor as Nicholas Nickleby,
should nevertheless be beautiful on all occasions, and never deficient
in readiness, address, or self-assertion. _Vanity Fair_ is specially
declared by the author to be "a novel without a hero," and therefore we
have hardly a right to complain of deficiency of heroic conduct in any
of the male characters. But Captain Dobbin does become the hero, and is
deficient. Why was he called Dobbin, except to