Many of the other faults of Dickens are cognate to this. He sacrifices everything for effect, and hence his proneness to horrors. The pictures are often wonderfully done, but they are unwholesome. The murder by Jonas Chuzzlewit, and still more the murder of Nancy, are examples. Sometimes Dickens goes wholly beyond the reach of pardon, as in the purely horrible and sickening description of spontaneous combustion in _Bleak House_. More frequently the sin is rather against proportion. We hear too much of the dragging of the river for dead bodies in _Our Mutual Friend_. Dickens never could learn where to stop. His highly pictorial imagination presented to him every detail of the scene; and, like a Pre-Raphaelite, he forgot that to the reader a general impression conveyed more truth than minute accuracy in every detail. The faults of Dickens grew with time, his merits tended to decline; but even to the end the characteristic merits are to be found. It was not unjustly said that his death had once more eclipsed the gaiety of nations. [Sidenote: William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863).] While Dickens, as has been seen, leaped into fame, his only contemporary rival, William Makepeace Thackeray, slowly and with difficulty forced his way to it. He was the senior of Dickens by rather more than half a year, having been born at Calcutta on July 18th, 1811. He was educated at the Charterhouse; and if his feelings may be inferred from his works they must have changed considerably. In his earlier writings it is Slaughter House; in _The Newcomes_ it is the celebrated Grey Friars. After leaving school Thackeray went in 1829 to Cambridge, but he left the University in 1830 without taking his degree. While he was there he contributed to _The Snob_, the name of which suggested to him a title in after years. One of his papers was an amusing burlesque on _Timbuctoo_, the subject for the prize poem, won by Tennyson, for 1829. In 1830 Thackeray went to Weimar, and he spent a considerable time there and in Paris training himself as an artist. The inaccuracy of his drawing was a fatal bar to his success in art; but he turned his studies to account afterwards in illustrating his own books; and there are probably no works in English in which the illustrations throw more light upon the text. In 1832 he became master of his little fortune of about £500 per annum, all of which was lost within a year or two. Most of it was sunk in an unprofitable newspaper adventure, reference to which is made in _Lovel the Widower_, and, with less accuracy of circumstance, in _Pendennis_. But if he lost his money by a newspaper, it was by journalism that he first gained his livelihood. He wrote for _The Times_, for _Fraser's Magazine_, and for the _New Monthly Magazine_, contributing to the second some of the most important of his early works; and for about eight years (1842-1850) he was one of the principal literary contributors to _Punch_. In these periodicals there appeared during the