This is the toxic property of all Thackeray’s writing.  He is himself forever dominated in imagination by the world, and even while he tells you it is not worth while he makes you feel that it is worth while.  It is not the honest man, but the man of honor, who shines in his page; his meek folk are proudly meek, and there is a touch of superiority, a glint of mundane splendor, in his lowliest.  He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different, even when he shows that its baseness, and cruelty, and hypocrisy are well-nigh inevitable, and, for most of those who wish to get on in it, quite inevitable.  He has a good word for the virtues, he patronizes the Christian graces, he pats humble merit on the head; he has even explosions of indignation against the insolence and pride of birth, and purse-pride.  But, after all, he is of the world, worldly, and the highest hope he holds out is that you may be in the world and despise its ambitions while you compass its ends.

I should be far from blaming him for all this.  He was of his time; but since his time men have thought beyond him, and seen life with a vision which makes his seem rather purblind.  He must have been immensely in advance of most of the thinking and feeling of his day, for people then used to accuse his sentimental pessimism of cynical qualities which we could hardly find in it now.  It was the age of intense individualism, when you were to do right because it was becoming to you, say, as a gentleman, and you were to have an eye single to the effect upon your character, if not your reputation; you were not to do a mean thing because it was wrong, but because it was mean.  It was romanticism carried into the region of morals.  But I had very little concern then as to that sort of error.

I was on a very high esthetic horse, which I could not have conveniently stooped from if I had wished; it was quite enough for me that Thackeray’s novels were prodigious works of art, and I acquired merit, at least with myself, for appreciating them so keenly, for liking them so much.  It must be, I felt with far less consciousness than my formulation of the feeling expresses, that I was of some finer sort myself to be able to enjoy such a fine sort.  No doubt I should have been a coxcomb of some kind, if not that kind, and I shall not be very strenuous in censuring Thackeray for his effect upon me in this way.  No doubt the effect was already in me, and he did not so much produce it as find it.

In the mean time he was a vast delight to me, as much in the variety of his minor works—­his ‘Yellowplush,’ and ‘Letters of Mr. Brown,’ and ‘Adventures of Major Gahagan,’ and the ‘Paris Sketch Book,’ and the ‘Irish Sketch Book,’ and the ‘Great Hoggarty Diamond,’ and the ’Book of Snobs,’ and the ‘English Humorists,’ and the ‘Four Georges,’ and all the multitude of his essays, and verses, and caricatures—­as in the spacious designs of his huge novels, the ‘Newcomes,’ and ‘Pendennis,’ and ’Vanity Fair,’ and ‘Henry Esmond,’ and ‘Barry Lyndon.’