These remarks about Dickens naturally lead me to say something about the development of our two authors. About Thackeray I cannot say very much. By the time he emerges from the undercurrent of journalistic work, all the essentials of the mature Thackeray seem almost fully developed. _Barry Lyndon_ is almost as mature in style as _Vanity Fair_. _Vanity Fair_ itself, Thackeray's first work of importance, is also his greatest work. That is, instead of working up to a climax as a novelist, Thackeray began at the top and worked downwards. Of course, we must remember that when he wrote it he had reached the age of thirty-seven. The subsequent novels, with the exception of _Esmond_, mark a deterioration, and not an advance. I must here make a slight digression to speak of _Esmond_. Into this brilliant historical patch Thackeray threw all his great knowledge of, and love for, the eighteenth century. He was soaked in eighteenth-century literature and history--witness his _Four Georges_ and _English Humourists_; and in _Esmond_ he assumed with consummate skill the eighteenth-century manner. In this novel Thackeray casts off completely his mask of cynicism, and appears as a man of noble feeling and deep sympathy, who could write a polished, pure, and straightforward English style. We feel, however, that the book is after all only a brilliant freak, and that the real Thackeray is the cynical, the satirical, and the caustic Thackeray of _Vanity Fair_. _Esmond_ stands to the rest of Thackeray's work somewhat in the relation of _Romola_ to George Eliot's other novels. In both the atmosphere is artificial, the result of long and careful study, and in both the deception is so perfect that the artificiality is almost impossible to detect. In two of his novels Dickens took historical subjects, namely in _Barnaby Rudge_ and the _Tale of Two Cities_. The latter is the acme of Dickens's attainments in the descriptive style, and is perhaps more restrained and artistic than any of his other works. In brilliant imagination and vivid representation of an historical phase he more than equals Thackeray, though his novel falls short of _Esmond_ in characterization. Esmond, Beatrix, and Lady Castlewood are much better than Darnay, Lucie, and the Doctor, though Sidney Carton, perhaps, is as fine as anything in Thackeray. To return to the question of development, we may say that Thackeray's style was fully developed during his career as a journalist, essayist, and writer of short stories, and that we find its culminating point in _Vanity Fair_.