Thackeray succeeded as
perhaps no novelist, except Fielding, had done before him. Becky Sharp,
Sir Pitt Crawley, Pendennis, Clive Newcome, all use such words as the
reader would expect from them. Their actions are the natural results of
the trains of thought into which the author has given us an insight.
When the old reprobate, Lord Steyne, discovers that Becky Sharp had
appropriated to herself the money which he had given her to restore
poor Miss Briggs' stolen property, he is not indignant at the
deception. The admiration of the noble rogue is only increased for the
woman who has shown herself to be possessed of a more astute roguery
than his own:--

"What an accomplished little devil it is!" thought he. "What a
splendid actress and manager! She had almost got a second supply
out of me the other day with her coaxing ways. She beats all the
women I have ever seen in the course of all my well-spent life!
They are babies compared to her. I am a green-horn myself and a
fool in her hands--an old fool. She is unsurpassable in lies." His
lordship's admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this proof of
her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing--but getting double
the sum she wanted and paying nobody--it was a magnificent stroke.

In his delineation of character, in the perfect naturalness with which
all his personages act out their respective parts, no novelist is more
realistic than Thackeray. But realism has a broader application. A
novelist who takes every-day life for his subject has not only to give
the stamp of nature to all his scenes and individuals, but he must so
write, that at the end of his book the reader will have the impression
that real life, with its due apportionment of good and evil, of
happiness and grief, has been placed before him. Some readers will
receive that impression from Thackeray's novels; but they will be those
who think that the evil and the unhappiness predominate. So thought the
author himself. But the world in general think differently, and agree
to look upon Thackeray as a satirist.

As such, he ranks in English literature second only to Swift. To the
great Dean, man was a lump of deformity and disease. He saw in humanity
little besides its vice, and painted his species in colors under which
few men have been willing to recognize a portrait. Thackeray's genial
disposition naturally made him far less bitter than Swift. He neither
saw nor portrayed