The actors in these events are as distinct and memorable as any in history or as any in life. It would be impossible for a reader not well acquainted with the age of Queen Anne to tell which of the personages in the book once moved in the flesh and which Thackeray created. And readers who have a wide acquaintance with the world and have known many of its sons and daughters will find in their gallery of memories no brilliant and heartless woman whom they seem to remember with more sense of intimacy and understanding than the woman who led Mr. Esmond such an uncomfortable dance and was the means of defeating Stuart ambitions--Beatrice Esmond. How are these personages of a fiction made to seem so lifelike? Genius only can answer, and genius is often unaware by just what devices a character is made to take on its own life and to walk, as it were, independent of the author. One thing is generally true of characters that strike us as real: they talk each in a style of his own, and yet they talk “like folks.” The thing that they do may be far removed from anything in our experience, a soldier may be talking to a king, Esmond may be speaking in noble anger to the prince; we feel somehow that the words on the page have in them the sound of the human voice, that a man placed in such circumstances would think and speak as the novelist makes him speak. In a good novel human beings, whose emotions represent and idealize our own, act and talk amid intelligible circumstances and entertaining events. These persons, since they seem real, are visible to the eye of fancy and the events happen in scenes--the divisions of a drama are called “scenes”--which strike the imagination as if they were actually striking the senses. Each person is recognizable by look and gesture; each place is distinct from all other places, as the room you sit in and the street beyond your window are different from all other rooms and all other highways in the world. Our master of story telling is a master of description. An unskillful author tries to persuade us that a woman is beautiful by merely asserting it, and his assertion makes no impression on us because it appeals to the part of our brain that collects information and not the part that sees pictures. But Thackeray paints Miss Beatrice tripping down the stairs to greet Esmond, and no eye that has seen her through Thackeray’s words but can recall the portrait at will. Further description of Beatrice accompanies the action all through the book and no one can tell, or cares to tell, where narration pauses and description begins.