and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was ready to go on his knees to any one who resembled a man of fashion.' And the kindly cynicism which discoloured Thackeray's ideas about women, notwithstanding his tender admiration and love for the best of them, comes out pointedly in old Sir Charles Lyndon's advice to Barry on the subject of matrimony: 'Get a friend, sir, and that friend a woman, a good household drudge, who loves you. _That_ is the most precious sort of friendship, for the expense of it is all on the woman's side. The man need not contribute anything. If he's a rogue, she'll vow he's an angel; if he's a brute, she will like him all the better for his ill-treatment of her. They like it, sir, these women; they are born to be our greatest comforts and conveniences, our moral boot-jacks, as it were.' Barry Lyndon discloses the promise and potency of Thackeray's genius. In _Vanity Fair_, his next work, it has attained its climax; the dramatic figures are more finely conceived, the plot is varied and more skilfully elaborated, the actors more numerous and life-like; and whereas in his preceding stories he has mainly used the form of a fictitious memoir, whereby the hero is made to tell his own tale, in this 'Novel without a Hero' the author proceeds by narration. The tone is still governed by irony and pathos, wherein Thackeray chiefly excels; yet the contrasts between weak and strong natures, the superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated, for the purposes of the social drama. The book's very title, _Vanity Fair_, denotes a transition from the scathing satire of his earlier manner to more indulgent irony, from Swift to Sterne, two authors whom Thackeray had evidently studied attentively. In his short preface the author preludes with the gentler note when he invites people of a lazy, benevolent, or sarcastic mood to step into the puppet show for a moment and look at the performance.