he sentimentalist in his representations. He trusts himself
resolutely to the genuine emotions of the heart, but he guards himself
against all superfine feelings and manufactured sentiment. His
characters are so true that at first we are inclined to consider them
commonplace. In their development, however, we soon find that the
author is a master in his art, that without pretension and without
exaggeration, he touches profound springs of thought and sentiment,
and represents with a graceful decision, and in clear light, those
evanescent and unconscious transpirations of character, in which a
novelist's capacity is most truly exhibited.

The animating spirit of the novel is that master-piece of address and
cunning, little Becky Sharp. Tact and talent never had a worthier
representative than this character. She indicates the extreme point of
worldly success to which these qualities will carry a person, and also
the impossibility of their providing against all contingencies in
life. Becky steadily rises in the world, reaches a certain height,
makes one inevitable mistake, and then as steadily falls, while many
of her simple companions, whom she despises as weaklings, succeed from
the very simplicity with which they follow the instinctive sagacity of
pure and honest feeling. Colonel Rawdon Crawley, a brainless
sensualist, whom Becky marries, and in some degree reforms, but who,
by having an occasional twinkle of genuine sentiment in his heart,
always was her superior, is drawn both with a breadth and a nicety of
touch which is rare in such delineations. The exact amount of humanity
which coexists with his rascality and stupidity, is given with perfect
accuracy. Sir Pitt Crawley, coarse, uneducated, sordid, quarrelsome,
his small, sharp mind an epitome of vulgar shrewdness, is a
personation to force laughter from the lungs of a misanthrope. Old Mr.
Sedley is a most truthful representation of a broken-down merchant,
conceived in the spirit of that humane humor which blends the
ludicrous and the pathetic in one. Joe Sedley, the East Indian,
slightly suggests Major Bagstock. He has the major's physical
circumference, apoplectic turn and swell of manner, with the addition
of Cockney vulgarity and cowardice. His retreat from Brussels, just
before the battle of Waterloo, is described with the art of a comic
Xenophan.

In the characters of George Osborne, Dobbin and Amelia, the author has
succeeded admirably. They are wonderfully