treatment--to make his godlike Romans at once Roman and Elizabethan,
and men of all time, and men of no time at all. Thackeray, with the
conveniences of the novel and the demands of his audience, _dichotomizes_
the presentation while observing a certain unity in the fictitious person,
now of Henry Esmond, now of William Makepeace Thackeray himself. If
anybody does not like the result, there is nothing to be said. But there
are those who regard it as one of the furthest explorations that we yet
possess of human genius--one of the most extraordinary achievements of that
higher imagination which Coleridge liked to call _esenoplastic_.(2) That a
man should have the faculty of reproducing contemporary or general life is
wonderful; that he should have the faculty of reproducing past life is
wonderful still more. But that he should thus revive the past and preserve
the present--command and provide at once theatre and company, audience and
performance--this is the highest wizardry of all. And this, as it seems to
me, is what Thackeray had attempted, and more, what he has done, in the
_History of Henry Esmond_.(3)

He could not have done it without the "pains" to which he refers in the
saying quoted above; but these pains, as usual, bore fruit more than once.
It has been thought desirable to include in the present volume the two
main after-crops,(4) _The English Humourists_ and _The Four Georges_.
Exactly _how_ early Thackeray's attention was drawn to the eighteenth
century it would, in the necessarily incomplete state of our biographical
information about him, be very difficult to say. We have pointed out that
the connexion was pretty well established as early as _Catherine_. But it
was evidently founded upon that peculiar congeniality, freshened and
enlivened with a proper dose of difference, which is the most certain
source and the purest maintainer of love in life and literature.

At the same time, the two sets of lectures are differentiated from the
novel not so much by their form--for Thackeray as a lecturer had very
little that smacked of the platform, and as a novelist he had a great deal
that smacked of the satiric conversation-scene--as by their purport.
_Esmond_, though partly critical, is mainly and in far the greater part
creative. The Lectures, though partly creative--_resurrective_, at any
rate--are professedly and substantially critical. Now, a good deal has been
said already of Thackeray's qualities and defects