ted by qualities apart from those which excited admiration for
the author. Dickens was essentially a national writer in the variety of
the characters with whom he brought his readers into communion. He was
essentially popular, from the fact that he dealt with the masses and
not with any particular class. He was essentially English, in that he
was the apostle of home. No novelist who has treated domestic life has
so thoroughly caught its spirit, and has so sympathetically traced its
joys and sorrows, its trials and recompenses. Family life has been for
more than two centuries gradually supplanting the life of the camp and
the court. It is in the domestic circle that men now find the interest
which was formerly sought in adventure or publicity. Not only in the
Christmas stories, especially devoted to the celebration of home, but
through all his great fictions Dickens made domestic life his chief
study. And he is, above all others, the favorite household novelist.
While he lived, each new work of his was welcomed alike by parent and
child, and when he died, there were few homes where books ever came
that the loss of a friend was not felt.

Scott, Dickens, almost all the great English novelists described heroes
and heroines. They made their chief character an embodiment of virtue
or strength, and strove to win for him the admiration of the reader.
Even Tom Jones was a hero to Fielding, and Roderick Random to Smollett.
But Thackeray said to himself as he looked out on the world, that
humanity was not made up of heroes and villains. He had never met with
the truly heroic, nor with the utterly depraved. It seemed to him that
human nature lay between the two extremes. In "Vanity Fair," in
"Pendennis" and in "The Newcomes" he resolved to describe man as he
was, with virtues and failings, with occasional glimpses of the noble,
and more common exhibitions of the mean and the little. Young men were
to appear in his pages with their weakness and selfishness; young girls
with their silliness and affectation. Thackeray, in a word, was to be
more realistic than his predecessors in fiction had dared to be. He was
to show his readers what they really were, and not what they would wish
to be.

But in Thackeray's novels is evident the difficulty of establishing any
generally accepted standard of realism. If this quality consists in
representing a character as speaking and acting just as we should
expect such a character to speak and act,