With the four Georges Thackeray was certainly not in sympathy. But they afforded him an ample field for the exercise of his satiric gifts, and he found occasion in his treatment of them for some passages of his most eloquent writing. The objection taken to this course of lectures has been as much political as literary. Thackeray is supposed to have treated the throne with scanty reverence; but it is the throne itself that is lacking in reverence when such lives are led; and the day for the concealment of disagreeable truths has long gone by. _The Virginians_, a continuation of _Esmond_, ran its periodical course from 1857 to 1859. In the latter year Thackeray became editor of the _Cornhill_, for which he wrote _Lovel the Widower_ (1860), _The Adventures of Philip_ (1861-1862), and the delicious _Roundabout Papers_, which he contributed occasionally from the beginning of his editorship to his death. _Denis Duval_ had not even begun to appear in the magazine, and only a small part had been written when the author was suddenly cut off at the age of fifty-two. It would not be easy to name two great contemporary writers, working in the same field of letters, more radically unlike than Dickens and Thackeray. Even the qualities they possess in common diverge as far as qualities bearing the same name can do. Both are humourists; but the humour of Thackeray is permeated through and through with satire; that of Dickens has not infrequently a touch of satire, but its essential principle is pure fun, and it is largely burlesque. We look for it in the absurdities of the Micawber family, in the Jarley wax-works, in the ridiculous adventures of the Pickwick Club, and in the solemn fatuity of Silas Wegg. Thackeray was a master of burlesque too, as his imitations of contemporary novels--_Phil Fogarty_, _Codlingsby_, _Rebecca and Rowena_--and his _Ballads of Policeman X_ prove. But it is a totally different burlesque. That of Dickens moves to laughter, and the laughter is frequently uproarious; Thackeray only excites a smile and a chuckle of intellectual enjoyment. The two writers differ equally in their pathos. Dickens, as we have seen, draws it out, paragraph after paragraph, chapter piled on chapter. Thackeray concentrates, partly from the artist's knowledge that concentration is necessary to permanent effect, in greater degree because of a personal dignity, accompanied by reticence, in which Dickens was certainly deficient. Just as there are substances which will not bear light, so there are feelings which seem to be profaned if they are too long exposed to view. All art involves exposure; but the difference between perfect taste and defective taste lies in knowing just in what manner and how long to make the exposure. In _The Four Georges_ two paragraphs contain all we are told about the last tragic years of George III.; and just a few lines of eloquence and pathos rarely equalled close the story.