Then Sterne—how he takes to pieces his feigned originality, his feigned benevolence, his feigned misanthropy—all feigned!—the licentious parson, the trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day, the man without a heart for those who loved him, without a conscience for those who trusted him! yet the same man who gave us the pathos of “Le Fevre,” and the humours of “Uncle Toby!” Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious is it?—well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest, human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth, on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is your fate, O ye men and women of genius! very hard and pitiful, if ye must be subjected to the scalpel of such a dissector! You, gifted sinner, whoever you may be, walking among us now in all the impunity of conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and sentimentalisms, performing great things, teaching good things, you are set up as one of the lights of the world:—Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a face? “Off, off ye lendings!” O God! how much wiser, as well as better, not to study how to _seem_, but how to _be_! How much wiser and better, not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who “shall pluck out the heart of your mystery,” and shall anatomise you, and deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and manners in Queen Victoria’s reign! In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages on character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman resents his Rebecca—inimitable Becky!—no woman but feels and acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful and finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author’s own words when speaking of ‘Tom Jones:’—“I can’t say that I think Amelia a virtuous character. I can’t say but I think Mr. Thackeray’s evident liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist’s moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art and ethics there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable.”