I have
endeavoured to describe as not being generally of a high order,--that it
is apt to become cold, stilted, and unsatisfactory. What may be done by
impossible castles among impossible mountains, peopled by impossible
heroes and heroines, and fraught with impossible horrors, _The Mysteries
of Udolpho_ have shown us. But they require a patient reader, and one
who can content himself with a long protracted and most unemotional
excitement. The sublimity which is effected by sparkling speeches is
better, if the speeches really have something in them beneath the
sparkles. Those of Bulwer generally have. Those of his imitators are
often without anything, the sparkles even hardly sparkling. At the best
they fatigue; and a novel, if it fatigues, is unpardonable. Its only
excuse is to be found in the amusement it affords. It should instruct
also, no doubt, but it never will do so unless it hides its instruction
and amuses. Scott understood all this, when he allowed himself only such
sudden bursts as I have described. Even in _The Bride of Lammermoor_,
which I do not regard as among the best of his performances, as he soars
high into the sublime, so does he descend low into the ludicrous.

In this latter division of pure fiction,--the burlesque, as it is
commonly called, or the ludicrous,--Thackeray is quite as much at home
as in the realistic, though, the vehicle being less powerful, he has
achieved smaller results by it. Manifest as are the objects in his view
when he wrote _The Hoggarty Diamond_ or _The Legend of the Rhine_, they
were less important and less evidently effected than those attempted by
_Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_. Captain Shindy, the Snob, does not tell
us so plainly what is not a gentleman as does Colonel Newcome what is.
Nevertheless the ludicrous has, with Thackeray, been very powerful, and
very delightful.

In trying to describe what is done by literature of this class, it is
especially necessary to remember that different readers are affected in
a different way. That which is one man's meat is another man's poison.
In the sublime, when the really grand has been reached, it is the
reader's own fault if he be not touched. We know that many are
indifferent to the soliloquies of Hamlet, but we do not hesitate to
declare to ourselves that they are so because they lack the power of
appreciating grand language. We do not scruple to attribute to those who
are indifferent some inferiority of intelligence. And