Du Maurier had all his life an intense admiration for Thackeray. He inherited none of Thackeray's bitterness, but upon every other ground as an author, at least, he descends from Thackeray, notably in the studied colloquialism of his style when writing, and in a general friendliness to the Philistine. And in his drawings in _Punch_ his satire is aimed in the same direction as Thackeray's always was. Like Thackeray, he was most at home on the plane where a social art, a delicate art of life is able to flourish. Of the concealed romanticist in du Maurier we have more than once already spoken. A Romanticist always turns to the past. Thackeray, in his lectures, also in the house he built for himself, and in a proposed but never finished history, went back into the past at least as far as Queen Anne's reign. _Esmond_, also of Queen Anne's reign, was the expression of a feature of Thackeray's temperament which never makes its full appearance in any other of his fictions. We believe that it was his own favourite among his works. But Thackeray did not succeed in expressing the whole of himself in the romantic vein; perhaps because he did not cultivate it from the start like Scott and Dumas. He was able to put more of himself into _Vanity Fair_. To think of Thackeray is to think first of _Vanity Fair_. From the unerring--because instinctive--judgment of the world this book received recognition as his masterpiece. Du Maurier had not so much of the genuine _flair_ for the eighteenth century as Thackeray. At heart he was much more in sympathy with the pre-Raphaelites and the love of early romance, whatever his pretence to the contrary in his satire, _A Legend of Camelot_. But there was no illustrator of his time with a greater gift for the romantic novel of any period; and inevitably, he became, in due course, the illustrator of _Esmond_. It is impossible to return to the past except by the path of poetry. It was possible to du Maurier in his illustrations to _Esmond_, because he was a poet. He used the effect of fading light in the sky seen through old leaded windows, and all the resources of poetic effect with a poet's and not an actor-manager's inspiration, wrapping the tale in the glamour in which Thackeray conceived it.