The other novels, less perfect as pictures of life, are not inferior in sheer intellect. _Vanity Fair_ and _Barry Lyndon_ are superlative examples of force of mind. The latter is so faithfully written from the scoundrel's point of view that only the excess of scoundrelism prevents Barry from commanding sympathy. The former contains in Becky Sharp the cleverest and most resourceful of all Thackeray's characters. It also contains, especially in the chapters on the Waterloo campaign, some of the finest English he ever wrote. _Pendennis_ has its special interest in the thread of autobiography interwoven with it; while _The Newcomes_ has its crowning glory in the old colonel, and in the famous scene in Grey Friars. After _The Newcomes_ the quality of Thackeray's work, or at least of his novels (for the lectures and the _Roundabout Papers_ stand apart) declined. He did not live long enough to demonstrate whether the decline was permanent or not; but certainly there is no lack of power in the _Roundabout Papers_; and in spite of his own dictum that no man ought to write a novel after fifty, Thackeray should have been just at his best when he died. Thackeray was a poet and an artist as well as a novelist; and sometimes in a copy of verses or in a sketch the inner spirit of the man may be seen more compendiously, if not more truly and surely, than in longer and more ambitious works. It is so here. The spirit that pervades _Vanity Fair_ is the same that inspired the _Ballad of Bouillabaisse_, the concluding stanzas of _The Chronicle of the Drum_, _The End of the Play_, _Vanitas Vanitatum_, and others of his more serious verses. There is a touch of satire in these verses, but there is far more of pity than scorn. Still more vividly this spirit shines through a triplet of sketches labelled respectively Ludovicus, Rex and Ludovicus Rex, the shivering little atom of humanity, the imposing trappings of royalty, and then the poor little mortal clothed in this magnificence. Here we have the quintessence of Thackeray's sermon through all his books, the difference between the humble reality and the vast pretensions, moral, intellectual and social, too often based on it. There is frequently scorn in the sermon, the more in proportion to the greatness of the pretensions. But there is almost always pity behind the scorn. Ludovicus Rex is, after all, the sport of fate. It is fate that decrees 'How very weak the very wise, How very small the very great are!'