But to say this, is not to condemn Thackeray as a cynic. With these many scenes of exquisite tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination that was far stronger on the darker and fouler sides of life than it was on the brighter and pure side of life. He saw the bright and pure side: he loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise, of that just vision of _chiaroscuro_, which we find in the greatest masters of the human heart. This limitation of his genius has been visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand. And such as it is, he must bear it. The place of Thackeray in English literature will always be determined by his _Vanity Fair_: which will be read, we may confidently predict, as long as _Tom Jones_, _Clarissa_, _Tristram Shandy_, _The Antiquary_, and _Pickwick_. But all the best of his pieces, even the smaller _jeux d'esprit_, may be read with delight again and again by young and old. And of the best are--_Esmond_, _The Newcomes_, _Barry Lyndon_, the _Book of Snobs_, the _Hoggarty Diamond_, some of the _Burlesques_ and _Christmas Books_, and the _English Humourists_. Of these, _Esmond_ has every quality of a great book, except its artificial form, its excessive elaboration of historical colouring, and its unsavoury plot. Beatrix Esmond is almost as wonderful a creation as Becky Sharp; though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than that incorrigible minx. The _Newcomes_, if in some ways the most genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of _Vanity Fair_. And if _Barry Lyndon_ has this power, it is an awful picture of cruelty and meanness. The _Book of Snobs_ and the _Hoggarty Diamond_ were each a kind of prelude to _Vanity Fair_, and both contain some of its essential marks of pathos and of power. It is indeed strange to us now to remember that both of these books, written with such finished mastery of hand and full of such passages of wit and insight, could have been published for years before the world had recognised that it had a new and consummate writer before it. The _Book of Snobs_ indeed may truly be said to have seriously improved the public opinion of the age, and to have given a death-blow to many odious forms of sycophancy and affectation which passed unrebuked in England fifty years ago.