It is natural that the burlesque should have been a favorite satiric mode from Aristophanes to Rostand and Shaw. The wit it requires is imitative rather than creative, and its appeal is instantaneous. It is also natural that it should manifest itself at the beginning of a writer’s career, and form a prelude to greater achievement. This is the case for good and sufficient psychological reasons. In youth the exuberant and undisciplined spirit, not yet checked by the reins of reality, riots in the glory of extravagance; the inventive faculty is awake but unfurnished by experience with material for original creation; the critical scent is keen but unpracticed, and impatient of sober, qualified judgment.[114] Such a condition is prime for the production of a _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, a _Joseph Andrews_, a _Northanger Abbey_, a _Pickwick_, a _Barry Lyndon_, a _Shaving of Shagpat_; to be followed by _Twelfth Night_, _Tom Jones_, _Emma_, _David Copperfield_, _Vanity Fair_, _The Egoist_. Thackeray’s apprenticeship at this desk was rather unduly prolonged, covering about half the period of his literary activity; and its output is difficult to segregate on account of the ambiguous description of much of his early work. But from the large mass of sketches, essays, skits, stories, perhaps half a dozen may be selected as being fairly within the limits of satirico-romance. Two of them, the _Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Yellowplush Papers_, are on the border line, included here only because too exaggerated and irresponsible to be otherwise classed. The same might be said of _Barry Lyndon_, which is not far from being a real novel. Yet perhaps none of these are more “grotesque” than some phases of legitimate fiction. Much of their humor comes from the dramatic monologue device. Five are roughly definable as burlesques: three--_Catherine_, _A Legend of the Rhine_, and _The Rose and the Ring_, of types; the other two, _Novels by Eminent Hands_, and _Rebecca and Rowena_, of individuals; yet here again, classification is misleading, as these latter are versus the _forms_ of certain productions rather than their _authors_.