His happiest speeches, as a result, are about great men whose private lives have already been laid bare to all the world. When he has to speak on Thackeray, whose life still remains half a secret, he devotes more space to literary criticism, and Thackeray remains for the most part an effigy hung with wreaths of compliments. It is the fashion nowadays to speak ill of Thackeray, and Lord Rosebery’s extravagances on the other side would tempt even a moderate man into disparagement. He refers to Thackeray as “the giant whom we discuss to-day.” There could not be a more inappropriate word for Thackeray than “giant.” One might almost as well call Jane Austen a “giantess.” Charlotte Brontë, as a young author coming under Thackeray’s spell, might legitimately feel that she was in the presence of a Titan. But a man may be a Titan to his contemporaries and yet be no Titan in the long line of great authors. Thackeray, I am convinced, is greatly underestimated to-day, but he will come back into his own only if we are prepared to welcome him on a level considerably below that of the Titans--below Dickens and Tolstoy, below even Sterne. Not that Lord Rosebery finds nothing to censure in Thackeray. Though he remarks that _Vanity Fair_ “appears to many of us the most full and various novel in the English language,” he has no praise for “the limp Amelia and the shadowy Dobbin.” At the same time, he turns aside his censures with a compliment. “The blemishes of _Vanity Fair_ exalt the book,” he declares; “for what must be the merits of a work which absolutely eclipse such defects?” It is one of the perils of oratory that it leads men to utter sentences of this kind. They mean little or nothing, but they have the ring of amiability. On the other hand, Lord Rosebery makes no concession to amiability in his criticism of _Esmond_. “The plot to me,” he says, “is simply repulsive. The transformation of Lady Castlewood from a mother to a wife is unnatural and distasteful to the highest degree. Thackeray himself declared that he could not help it. This, I think, only means that he saw no other than this desperate means of extricating the story. I cannot help it, too. One likes what one likes, and one dislikes what one dislikes.” An occasional reservation of this kind helps to give flavour to Lord Rosebery’s compliments. It gives them the air of being the utterances, not of a professional panegyrist, but of a detached and impartial mind. Thus he begins his eulogy of Dr. Johnson with a confession that Johnson’s own writings are dead for him apart from “two poems and some pleasing biographies.” “Speaking as an individual and illiterate Briton”--so he makes his confession. It is as though the tide withdrew in order to come in with all the more surprising volume.