here writes the history of
his early life. He retains the manners, and with the manners the
language of his youth. He lives among his own people, a country
gentleman with a broad domain, mixing but little with the world beyond,
and remains an English gentleman of the time of Queen Anne. The story is
continued in _The Virginians_, the name given to a record of two lads
who were grandsons of Harry Esmond, whose names are Warrington. Before
_The Virginians_ appeared we had already become acquainted with a scion
of that family, the friend of Arthur Pendennis, a younger son of Sir
Miles Warrington, of Suffolk. Henry Esmond's daughter had in a previous
generation married a younger son of the then baronet. This is mentioned
now to show the way in which Thackeray's mind worked afterwards upon the
details and characters which he had originated in _Esmond_.

It is not my purpose to tell the story here, but rather to explain the
way in which it is written, to show how it differs from other stories,
and thus to explain its effect. Harry Esmond, who tells the story, is of
course the hero. There are two heroines who equally command our
sympathy,--Lady Castlewood the wife of Harry's kinsman, and her
daughter Beatrix. Thackeray himself declared the man to be a prig, and
he was not altogether wrong. Beatrix, with whom throughout the whole
book he is in love, knew him well. "Shall I be frank with you, Harry,"
she says, when she is engaged to another suitor, "and say that if you
had not been down on your knees and so humble, you might have fared
better with me? A woman of my spirit, cousin, is to be won by gallantry,
and not by sighs and rueful faces. All the time you are worshipping and
singing hymns to me, I know very well I am no goddess." And again: "As
for you, you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at
your feet and cry, O caro, caro! O bravo! whilst you read your
Shakespeares and Miltons and stuff." He was a prig, and the girl he
loved knew him, and being quite of another way of thinking herself,
would have nothing to say to him in the way of love. But without
something of the aptitudes of a prig the character which the author
intended could not have been drawn. There was to be courage,--military
courage,--and that propensity to fighting which the tone of the age
demanded in a finished gentleman. Esmond therefore is ready enough to
use his sword. But at the same time he has to live as becomes one whose
name is i