st, from _The Virginians_, fine as much of that is, onwards, it is
permissible, without unreason or want of generosity, to discern a
slight, a very slight, flagging, not in the quality or kind of the
power, but in the vigour and freshness with which it is applied. But in
_Pendennis_, in _Esmond_, and in _The Newcomes_, it appears as it does
nowhere else in English, or in any literature. It is not so much the
holding up of the mirror to life as the presentation of life itself.
Although the figures, the scheme of thought and sentiment and sense,
differ from what we find in Shakespeare by the whole difference between
poetry and prose, there is, on the lower level, a positive gain in
vividness by the absence of the restraints and conventions of the drama
and the measured line. Every act, every scene, every person in these
three books is real with a reality which has been idealised just up to
and not beyond the necessities of literature. It does not matter what
the acts, the scenes, the personages may be. Whether we are at the
height of romantic passion with Esmond's devotion to Beatrix, and his
transactions with the duke and the prince over diamonds and title deeds;
whether the note is that of the simplest human pathos, as in Colonel
Newcome's death-bed; whether we are indulged with society at Baymouth
and Oxbridge; whether we take part in Marlborough's campaigns or assist
at the Back Kitchen--we are in the House of Life, a mansion not too
frequently opened to us by the writers of prose fiction. It was
impossible that Thackeray should live long or write very many novels
when he had once found his way. The lesson of the greatest imagination
of his great contemporary and master settles that. Not the "Peau de
Chagrin" itself could have enabled any man to produce a long succession
of novels such as _Vanity Fair_ and _Esmond_.

During the time before the century reached its middle, in which Bulwer
and Dickens were the most popular of novelists, while Thackeray was
slowly making his way to the place that was properly his, the demand for
novels, thoroughly implanted in the public by the success of Scott, was
constantly met by work of all sorts, very little of which survives
except in country circulating libraries and on the shelves of houses the
ownership of which has not changed hands for some considerable time.
Very little of it, indeed, much deserved to survive. Lockhart, an
exceedingly judicious critic, thought it necessary not