In one of Lever’s novels--I believe--an Irish solicitor was asked by an Englishman the reason for the success of a famous Counsellor with juries and replied, “He first butthers them up; and then slithers them down.” I am going to take the same liberty with that great novelist W. M. Thackeray, only I protest that my butter is genuine and were I an Irishman myself I should say it came from the heart. I cheerfully bow before the genius of England’s master of fiction. His characters are my friends, his kindly wisdom my delight, his pathos can move me almost to tears, his cynicism is a constant stimulant. His style is to me incomparable and fills me with envy and despair. His books are my best companions in sickness and in health, in depression and in my most cheerful moments. If I am his critic, it is because he is so old a friend that I love him alike for his weaknesses and peculiarities and for his great merits. With the utmost humility I commend his scholarship and appreciation of the literature of the eighteenth century. His “Four Georges” and “English Humorists” are to me models of what literary lectures should be. I could praise him till I wearied my audience, and all my praise would be absolutely genuine. No student of Thackeray can fail to admire the way in which he prepared himself by study for his historical novels. In “Esmond” and the “Virginians” he saturated himself in the literature of his period. He could catch the style of the pamphleteer, the newspaper writer; he reproduces the conversation of the wits so as occasionally to deceive the very elect. The descriptions of life at Castlewood, of the service in Winchester Cathedral, the letters of the old Marchioness of Esmond, Henry Esmond’s contribution to the _Spectator_, the account of the battle of Wynandael, etc., are all masterpieces. So are some of the minor characters in these novels--Will Esmond in the “Virginians,” for example, Father Holt, Esmond’s Jesuit tutor and, above all, Parson Sampson in the “Virginians.” But his principal actors are not, I think, of the eighteenth century at all. They are the people Thackeray himself knew, in the garb of their supposed period, but really men and women of the middle of the nineteenth century. Esmond and George Warrington, Rachel, Lady Castlewood, and her incomparable daughter Beatrix are, with all their perfect accessories, modern men and women playing a part, admirably it is true, but still a part, in the comedy of a bygone age. In the days of Anne and the Georges I am confident no one felt or acted or thought as they are represented by our author. It is only when Thackeray is out of sympathy with his heroes that he makes them true to their age. In “Barry Lyndon” we have the genuine article, so we do in his uncle, the Chevalier de Balibari, so again in every character in “Catherine,” which was intended as a burlesque. But in the more serious novels I feel somehow that Thackeray did not really transport his