s last full length fiction, may be cited
as proof.

Yet it may be that he would have given increased attention to
construction had he lived a long life. It is worth noting that
when the unfinished "Denis Duval" dropt from a hand made inert
by death, the general plan, wherefrom an idea of its
architecture could be got, was among his effects.

To say a word now of Thackeray's style. There is practical
unanimity of opinion as to this. Thackeray had the effect of
writing like a cultivated gentleman not self-consciously making
literature. He was tolerant of colloquial concessions that never
lapsed into vulgarity; even his slips and slovenlinesses are
those of the well-bred. To pass from him back to Richardson is
to realize how stiffly correct is the latter. Thackeray has
flexibility, music, vernacular felicity and a deceptive ease. He
had, too, the flashing strokes, the inspirational sallies which
characterize the style of writers like Lamb, Stevenson and
Meredith. Fitness, balance, breeding and harmony are his chief
qualities. To say that he never sinned or nodded would be to
deny that he was human. He cut his cloth to fit the desired
garment and is a modern English master of prose designed to
reproduce the habit and accent of the polite society of his age.
In his hortatory asides and didactic moralizings with their
thees and thous and yeas, he is still the fine essayist, like
Fielding in his eighteenth century prefatory exordiums. And here
is undoubtedly one of his strongest appeals to the world of
readers, whether or no it makes him less perfect a fictionist.
The diction of a Thackeray is one of the honorable national
assets of his race.

Thackeray's men and women talk as they might be expected to talk
in life; each in his own idiom, class and idiosyncrasy. And in
the descriptions which furnish atmosphere, in which his
creatures may live and breathe and have their being, the hand of
the artist of words is equally revealed. Both for dialogue and
narration the gift is valid, at times superb. It would be going
too far to say that if Thackeray had exercised the care in
revision bestowed by later reputable authors, his style might
not have been improved: beyond question it would have been, in
the narrow sense. But the correction of trifling mistakes is one
thing, a change in pattern another. The retouching, although
satisfying grammar here and there, might have dimmed the
vernacular value of his speech.

But what of T