may
have been a faulty novelist but assuredly he was a rare artist in words.
Setting aside Cardinal Newman's, the style he wrote is certainly less
open to criticism than that of any other modern Englishman. He was
neither super-eloquent like Mr. Ruskin nor a Germanised Jeremy like
Carlyle; he was not marmoreally emphatic as Landor was, nor was he
slovenly and inexpressive as was the great Sir Walter; he neither dallied
with antithesis like Macaulay nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms with
Dickens; he abstained from technology and what may be called
Lord-Burleighism as carefully as George Eliot indulged in them, and he
avoided conceits as sedulously as Mr. George Meredith goes out of his way
to hunt for them. He is a better writer than any one of these, in that
he is always a master of speech and of himself, and that he is always
careful yet natural and choice yet seemingly spontaneous. He wrote as a
very prince among talkers, and he interfused and interpenetrated English
with the elegant and cultured fashion of the men of Queen Anne and with
something of the warmth, the glow, the personal and romantic ambition,
peculiar to the century of Byron and Keats, of Landor and Dickens, of
Ruskin and Tennyson and Carlyle. Unlike his only rival, he had learnt
his art before he began to practise it. Of the early work of the greater
artist a good half is that of a man in the throes of education: the
ideas, the thoughts, the passion, the poetry, the humour, are of the
best, but the expression is self-conscious, strained, ignorant. Thackeray
had no such blemish. He wrote dispassionately, and he was a born writer.
In him there is no hesitation, no fumbling, no uncertainty. The style of
_Barry Lyndon_ is better and stronger and more virile than the style of
_Philip_; and unlike the other man's, whose latest writing is his best,
their author's evolution was towards decay.

His Mission.

He is so superior a person that to catch him tripping is a peculiar
pleasure. It is a satisfaction apart, for instance, to reflect that he
has (it must be owned) a certain gentility of mind. Like the M.P. in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, he represents the Gentlemanly Interest. That is his
mission in literature, and he fulfils it thoroughly. He appears
sometimes as Mr. Yellowplush, sometimes as Mr. Fitzboodle, sometimes as
Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but always in the Gentlemanly Interest. In his
youth (as ever) he is found applauding the well-bred Cha