praise is the severest cut of
all. "Dear Rebecca," "the dear creature," and we wince for Becky. "What
a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the banker's! How
tenderly we look at her faults, if she be a relative." "These money
transactions, these speculations in life and death--these silent
battles for reversionary spoil--make brothers very loving toward each
other in Vanity Fair."

Thackeray is the novelist whose works depend in the least degree on
narrative interest. The characters are so clearly drawn and so
interesting, the manner of Thackeray's writing is so uniformly
entertaining, that his books can always be opened at random and read
with pleasure. "Henry Esmond" is the only novel in which the plot is
carefully constructed. The others are a string of consecutive chapters,
each one of which possesses its individual interest.[208]

The novel of English life and manners includes many subdivisions. Among
the writings of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, Bulwer Lytton, Mr.
Anthony Trollope, and others, are novels which deal to a greater or
less extent with fashionable life. A number of novelists, principally
female, have confined their studies to the aristocratic classes.[209]
But the so called fashionable novel is most often the composition of
adventurers whose catch-penny productions aim at affording, to the
middle or lower ranks, information concerning the habits of the
aristocracy. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that
fashionable life in these novels is such as it might appear to an
imaginative kitchen-maid whose idea of up-stairs existence is founded
on the gossip of servants. When written by persons conversant with
their subject, the fashionable novel forms a legitimate subdivision of
the novel of life and manners. But it is most often a noxious weed. Its
cultivators constantly make up for lack of talent by the excitement of
immoral scenes, and give to their audience of sempstresses and grooms a
most degraded view of aristocratic life. Even when harmless in matter,
its rank luxuriance fills up space much better occupied by the flowers
of literature.

The eminent criminal novel is taken as a tonic by minds satiated with
the vapidity of fashionable fiction. From Lytton's "Paul Clifford," and
Ainsworth's "Jack Sheppard," down to "Merciless Ben, the Hair-Lifter,"
criminal narrative has been occupied with endowing burglars and
murderers with the graces of gentlemen and the moral worth of Christia