bad and disappointments in the good are perpetually obstructing our judgment, by bringing what should decide it too close to that common standard of experience in which our only rule of opinion is charity.  For it is only in fictitious characters which are highly coloured for one definite object, or in notorious personages viewed from a distance, that the course of the true moral can be seen to run straight—­once bring the individual with his life and circumstances closely before you, and it is lost to the mental eye in the thousand pleas and witnesses, unseen and unheard before, which rise up to overshadow it.  And what are all these personages in “Vanity Fair” but feigned names for our own beloved friends and acquaintances, seen under such a puzzling cross-light of good in evil, and evil in good, of sins and sinnings against, of little to be praised virtues, and much to be excused vices, that we cannot presume to moralise upon them—­not even to judge them,—­content to exclaim sorrowfully with the old prophet, “Alas! my brother!” Every actor on the crowded stage of “Vanity Fair” represents some type of that perverse mixture of humanity in which there is ever something not wholly to approve or to condemn.  There is the desperate devotion of a fond heart to a false object, which we cannot respect; there is the vain, weak man, half good and half bad, who is more despicable in our eyes than the decided villain.  There are the irretrievably wretched education, and the unquenchably manly instincts, both contending in the confirmed roue, which melt us to the tenderest pity.  There is the selfishness and self-will which the possessor of great wealth and fawning relations can hardly avoid.  There is the vanity and fear of the world, which assist mysteriously with pious principles in keeping a man respectable; there are combinations of this kind of every imaginable human form and colour, redeemed but feebly by the steady excellence of an awkward man, and the genuine heart of a vulgar woman, till we feel inclined to tax Mr. Thackeray with an under estimate of our nature, forgetting that Madame de Stael is right after all, and that without a little conventional rouge no human conplexion can stand the stage-lights of fiction.

But if these performers give us pain, we are not ashamed to own, as we are speaking openly, that the chief actress herself gives us none at all.  For there is of course a principal pilgrim in Vanity Fair, as much as in its emblematical original, Bunyan’s “Progress”; only unfortunately this one is travelling the wrong way.  And we say “unfortunately” merely by way of courtesy, for in reality we care little about the matter.  No, Becky—­our hearts neither bleed for you, nor cry out against you.  You are wonderfully clever, and amusing, and accomplished, and intelligent, and the Soho ateliers were not the best nurseries for a moral training; and you were married early in life to a regular blackleg, and you have had to live upon your wits ever since, which