Dickens himself was entirely instinctive in his class feelings; his mind was a typical middle-class muddle, and his remedy for the ills he pictured was kindness and poor law reform and charity bazaars--hanging paper garlands about the neck of the tiger of capitalism. The British masses needed time in which to find out how to bind and destroy this beast; but the first service was to proclaim the fact that this capitalist world is a world impossible for sensitive and decent human beings to endure--a world in which justice has become the Circumlocution Office, and truth has become Thomas Gradgrind, and Christianity has become Mr. Pecksniff and Uriah Heep. CHAPTER LXXIII THE COLLECTOR OF SNOBS Emerson, commenting upon the old saying that “No man is a hero to his valet,” put the question: “What hero ever had a valet?” This goes to prove that Emerson was not a reader of popular fiction; for if he had been following the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray in “Fraser’s Magazine,” he would have known that it is impossible for any hero to be without a valet. In Dickens we enter into the lives of the poor, and in Thackeray we enter into the lives of the rich, and it is hard for us to decide which class has the greater claim to our pity. Thackeray was bom in India, his father being a government official. They tried to educate him at Cambridge, but it didn’t take, because he was incorrigibly desultory, a big, good-natured fellow who loved eating and drinking and gambling and good fellowship--everything, in short, but hard work. He early lost his fortune, trying to publish a paper; then he had to work, and became a contributor to “Punch,” and developed a faculty for burlesque verses and satiric sketches. In my youth there was general complaint that Thackeray was “a cynic.” Let us settle that question at the outset; he was one of the most sentimental souls that ever walked about the world in trousers. But he had a pair of eyes, and he saw in the fashionable society around him a hundred different varieties of snobs; he collected them into a “Book of Snobs”--each one like a butterfly stuck on a pin. He went on to write a series of novels, full of scoldings varied by ridicule of human vanity and folly.