lose, Dickens is sure to be more and more appreciated. A return to a saner and truer criterion will be general and the confines of a too narrow estheticism be understood: or, better yet, the esthetic will be so defined as to admit of wider application. The Gissings and Chestertons of the time to come will insist even more strenuously than those of ours that while we may have improved upon Dickens' technique--and every schoolboy can tinker his faults--we shall do exceedingly well if we duplicate his genius once in a generation. And they will add that Thackeray, another man of genius, had also his malaises of art, was likewise a man with the mortal failings implied in the word. For it cannot now be denied that just as Dickens' faults have been exaggerated, Thackeray's have been overlooked. Thackeray might lose sadly in the years to come could it be demonstrated that, as some would have it, he deserved the title of cynic. Here is the most mooted point in Thackeray appreciation: it interests thousands where the nice questions concerning the novelist's art claim the attention of students alone. What can be said with regard to it? It will help just here to think of the man behind the work. No sensible human being, it would appear, can become aware of the life and personality of Thackeray without concluding that he was an essentially kind-hearted, even soft-hearted man. He was keenly sensitive to praise and blame, most affectionate and constant with his friends, generous and impulsive in his instincts, loving in his family, simple and humble in his spiritual nature, however questioning in his intellect. That is a fair summary of Thackeray as revealed in his daily walk--in his letters, acts and thoughts. Nothing could be sweeter and more kindly than the mass of his writings in this regard, pace "The Book of Snobs"--even in such a mood the satire is for the most part unbitter. The reminiscential essays continually strike a tender note that vibrates with human feeling and such memorials as the paper he wrote on the deaths of Irving and Macaulay represent a frequent vein. Thackeray's friends are almost a unit in this testimony: Edward Fitzgerald, indeed--"dear old Fitz," as Tennyson loved to call him--declares in a letter to somebody that he hears Thackeray is spoiled: meaning that his social success was too much for him. It is true that after the fame of "Vanity Fair," its author was a habitue of the best drawing-rooms, much sought after, and enjoying it hugely. But to read his letter to Mrs. Brookfield after the return home from such frivolities is to feel that the real man is untouched. Why Thackeray, with such a nature, developed a satirical bent and became a critic of the foibles of fashion and later of the social faults of humanity, is not so easy perhaps to say--unless we beg the question by declaring it to be his nature. When he began his major fiction at the age of thirty-seven he had seen much more of the seamy