“Catherine,” a satire upon the “Newgate Novels,” naturally contains a collection of jail-birds; and these, of course, are not treated as they would have been by Ainsworth or Bulwer Lytton, but are shown in all their hideousness. “A Shabby Genteel Story” is a very fine piece of work, but its theme is unpleasant--the trapping into a mock marriage of trusting Cinderella--and the characters objectionable: Mr. and Mrs. Gann and the Misses Macarty; Brandon, Tufthunt, and Cinqbars. Fitch is the one honest person, save the heroine, and he is vulgar. Tufthunt is, perhaps, the worst man Thackeray ever depicted, for Sir Francis Clavering is weak rather than vile, and Brandon--the Dr. Firmin of “Philip”--suffers from a moral sense so perverted that he cannot realise his own weakness. [Illustration: See note on page 40.] The rascal Fitz-Boodle is a humorist of the first water. His iniquity was the writing of those scandalous chronicles of his friends’ private lives, “Men’s Wives,” which tell of the scoundrel Walker, the blackguard Boroski, and the selfish, vain, and terribly vulgar Mrs. Dennis Haggarty. The stories of “Dorothea” and “Ottilia,” however, are agreeable enough. Even “Barry Lyndon,” one of the author’s masterpieces, is a disagreeable story. This, indeed, Thackeray fully realised. “You need not read it,” he said to his eldest daughter; “you would not like it.” The villain Barry, who never realises that he is not a hero, and his foolish wife, are only in part counterbalanced by Barry’s vulgar, loving mother, who goes to him in the day of his ruin and nurses him until he dies of _delirium tremens_ in the nineteenth year of his residence in the Fleet prison. After “Barry Lyndon” appeared “Vanity Fair,” “Pendennis,” “The Newcomes,” “Esmond,” and “The Virginians,” which contain so vast a number of characters that it is impossible to treat of them one by one. [Illustration: W. M. THACKERAY _From the painting by Samuel Laurence in the National Portrait Gallery_] “Wherever shines the sun, you are sure to find Folly basking in it. Knavery is the shadow at Folly’s heels,” Thackeray wrote in the character sketch of “Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon.” It seems as if he had not quite grasped the fact that there were other things than folly and knavery to write about, and that a surfeit of rogues has an unpleasant after-effect. “Oh! for a little manly, honest. God-relying simplicity, cheerful, affected, and humble!” he had prayed in one of his earliest reviews; but it was only with “Vanity Fair” that he began to _give_ it. It has been stated by more than one critic that Thackeray could not depict a good woman, and that those that were without blemish were also without any attractive qualities. Yet Helen Pendennis was a good woman, a good wife, and a good mother; and Laura Bell was clever as well as good; and certainly Ethel Newcome [Illustration: _From a Photograph_ W. M. THACKERAY