characters into a bygone age. Of this he seems to have been conscious himself. When he drew pictures to illustrate “Vanity Fair,” he did not depict Rawdon Crawley as a Waterloo guardsman, nor Becky as a lady of fashion in 1816, nor Pitt as an aristocratic member of the Clapham set. He drew them as the people he knew himself and dressed them in the costume of his own time, thus acknowledging how he really regarded his own creations. The ruling aristocracy came to an end when the Reform Bill was passed in 1832, but their prestige remained. The middle class entered the Promised Land and took their share in its government: but not triumphantly. I may almost say they were abashed by their success. The peers could no more return a great proportion of the House of Commons, they could no more promote or cast down common men much as they pleased. They dare no longer defy public opinion as their predecessors had done. Yet to the middle class they still appeared august enough. Their manners, their breeding, the state in which many lived, inspired no little awe among those immediately below them. Society was divided into castes almost as rigidly, though less formally, than in India to-day. The old Whig nobility still considered themselves divinely called to rule the country and to dictate to the sovereign. The county families held aloof from the inhabitants of the town; and barely tolerated the professional classes. The beneficed clergy, barristers, medical men, lesser army officers, etc., scorned the traders. The wholesale trader held the retail storekeeper in scorn and so on _ad infinitum_. But in England the barriers of rank were never insurmountable, and in a free country anyone was at liberty to try to climb them. Hence everybody endeavored with varying success to ascend the social ladder, and did not scruple to use other people as stepping stones. Thus arose the fierce fight to get into what is still called “Society” and the rampant snobbery which Thackeray was never tired of denouncing. With this we may begin the investigation of his attitude towards the society of his age.