e, that it was more precocious. But
after-judgment has, I think, not declared either of the suggestions to
be true. I will make no comparison between two such rivals, who were so
distinctly different from each, and each of whom, within so very short a
period, has come to stand on a pedestal so high,--the two exalted to so
equal a vocation. And if Dickens showed the best of his power early in
life, so did Thackeray the best of his intellect. In no display of
mental force did he rise above _Barry Lyndon_. I hardly know how the
teller of a narrative shall hope to mount in simply intellectual faculty
above the effort there made. In what then was the difference? Why was
Dickens already a great man when Thackeray was still a literary
Bohemian?

The answer is to be found not in the extent or in the nature of the
genius of either man, but in the condition of mind,--which indeed may be
read plainly in their works by those who have eyes to see. The one was
steadfast, industrious, full of purpose, never doubting of himself,
always putting his best foot foremost and standing firmly on it when he
got it there; with no inward trepidation, with no moments in which he
was half inclined to think that this race was not for his winning, this
goal not to be reached by his struggles. The sympathy of friends was
good to him, but he could have done without it. The good opinion which
he had of himself was never shaken by adverse criticism; and the
criticism on the other side, by which it was exalted, came from the
enumeration of the number of copies sold. He was a firm reliant man,
very little prone to change, who, when he had discovered the nature of
his own talent, knew how to do the very best with it.

It may almost be said that Thackeray was the very opposite of this.
Unsteadfast, idle, changeable of purpose, aware of his own intellect but
not trusting it, no man ever failed more generally than he to put his
best foot foremost. Full as his works are of pathos, full of humour,
full of love and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and
honour and manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to
me to do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to
lack something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness
which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He
seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then to
have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that