Did he ever write "a complete, good story"? Did any one ever do such a thing as write a three-volume, novel, or a novel of equal length, which was "a complete, good story"? Probably not; or if any mortal ever succeeded in the task, it was the great Alexander Dumas. "The Three Musketeers," I take leave to think, and "Twenty Years After," are complete good stories, good from beginning to end, stories from beginning to end without a break, without needless episode. Perhaps one may say as much for "Old Mortality," and for "Quentin Durward." But Scott and Dumas were born story-tellers; narrative was the essence of their genius at its best; the current of romance rolls fleetly on, bearing with it persons and events, mirroring scenes, but never ceasing to be the main thing--the central interest. Perhaps narrative like this is the chief success of the novelist. He is triumphant when he carries us on, as Wolf, the famous critic, was carried on by the tide of the Iliad, "in that pure and rapid current of action." Nobody would claim this especial merit for Thackeray. He is one of the greatest of novelists; he displays human nature and human conduct so that we forget ourselves in his persons, but he does not make us forget ourselves in their fortunes. Whether Clive does or does not marry Ethel, or Esmond, Beatrix, does not very greatly excite our curiosity. We cannot ring the bells for Clive's second wedding as the villagers celebrated the bridal of Pamela. It is the development of character, it is the author's comments, it is his own personality and his unmatched and inimitable style, that win our admiration and affection. We can take up "Vanity Fair," or "Pendennis," or "The Newcomes," just where the book opens by chance, and read them with delight, as we may read Montaigne. When one says one can take up a book anywhere, it generally means that one can also lay it down anywhere. But it is not so with Thackeray. Whenever we meet him he holds us with his charm, his humour, his eloquence, his tenderness. If he has not, in the highest degree, the narrative power, he does possess, in a degree perhaps beyond any other writer of English, that kind of poetic quality which is not incompatible with prose writing. A great deal has been said about prose poetry. As a rule, it is very poor stuff. As prose it has a tendency to run into blank verse; as poetry it is highly rhetorical and self-conscious. It would be invidious and might be irritating to select examples from modern masters of prose- poetry. They have never been poets. But the prose of a poet like Milton may be, and is, poetical in the true sense; and so, upon occasions, was the prose of Thackeray. Some examples linger always in the memory, and dwell with their music in the hearing. One I have quoted elsewhere; the passage in "The Newcomes" where Clive, at the lecture on the Poetry of the Domestic Affections, given by Sir Barnes Newcome, sees Ethel, whom he has lost.