Ah, master of the good enchantment, you have given us hours of ease and joy, and we thank you for them. But there is a greater gift than that. You have made us more willing to go cheerfully and companionably along the strange, crowded, winding way of human life, because you have deepened our faith that there is something of the divine on earth, and something of the human in heaven. THACKERAY AND REAL MEN In that fragrant bunch of _Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children_ which has just brightened and sweetened our too sadly strenuous times there are some passages on novel-reading which are full of spirited good sense. He says that he can read _Pendennis_, and _The Newcomes_, and _Vanity Fair_ over and over again; he agrees with his boy in preferring Thackeray to Dickens, and then he gives the reason—or at least _a_ reason—for this preference: “Of course one fundamental difference ... is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not.” The damnatory clause in this sentence seems to me too absolute, though Roosevelt softens it by adding, “but a man might do some mighty good work without being in any sense a gentleman.” That is certainly true, and beyond a doubt Dickens did it—a wonderful plenty of it. It is also true that in several perfectly good senses he was a brave and kind gentleman, despite his faults in manners and dress. But it is the laudatory clause in Roosevelt’s judgment that interests me. Thackeray’s work is pervaded with his personality to an unusual degree. It is a saturated solution of the man. We can taste him in every page. And it is because we like the taste, because we find something strong and true, bracing and stimulant in it, that we love to read him. ’Tis like being with a gentleman in any enterprise or adventure; it gives us pleasure and does us unconscious good. Well, then, what do we mean by “a gentleman?” Tennyson calls it The grand old name of gentleman Defamed by every charlatan, And soil’d with all ignoble use. In the big New Oxford Dictionary there is more than a pageful of definitions of the word, and almost every English essayist has tried a shot at it. One thing is sure, its old hereditary use as a title of rank or property is going out, or already gone. “John Jones, Gent.,” is a vanishing form of address. More and more the word is coming to connote something in character and conduct. Inheritance may enter into it, and the sense of honour has a great part in it, and its outward and visible sign is an unassuming fitness of behaviour in the various circumstances of life. But its indispensable essence is reality; its native speech, sincerity; and its controlling spirit, good-will. Let us content ourselves with a description instead of a definition. A gentleman is a real man who deals honestly, bravely, frankly, and considerately with all sorts and conditions of other real men.