No novelist gives us such a company of _great_ men and women--very few give us even one great man. In some ways we may compare with Shakspere’s characters those of Balzac. The great French novelist set out to represent typical characters of all classes of the society he knew. He has as varied a company as Shakspere, and it is typical of society as Shakspere’s is not; but none of Balzac’s characters can for a moment be considered as great as Shakspere’s. Even the Country Doctor, perhaps Balzac’s noblest creation, has no such depth of interest as Hamlet, for example, though we might possibly compare him with Prospero; and what a creature is the Duchesse de Langeais beside Portia! But a novelist who gives us no characters which we can take an interest in even if we do not love them or admire them is not much of a novelist. The name of Thackeray suggests Becky Sharpe and Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome. The fine substance of Thackeray’s men and women, both good and bad, their refinement and delicacy and intelligence and sensibility, mark them as personalities far above the ordinary in fiction; and so they give Thackeray a rank that the variety of his characters and the range of his sympathies would not otherwise entitle him to. Dickens is to us but a name for the little dream world in which we make the acquaintance of David Copperfield and Micawber and Peggotty and Agnes and Dora, of the father of the Marshalsea and Little Dorrit and their friends of the prison, of Little Nell and her friends, of Oliver Twist and his thievish but interesting companions. Dickens’s characters are not examples for admiration; but they are intensely interesting because so intensely human, coming so near to us ourselves as they often do even when we are least ready to admit it. And unquestionably their number is great. The number and variety of an author’s characters are always to be taken into account in estimating his greatness, or even his value to us individually. Scott’s characters are very different from any of these. They seem made especially to wear picturesque historic costumes, and in their almost limitless multitude they form a pageantry which is splendid and entrancing in the extreme. The thing of value is that the pageantry is alive; and if Scott’s characters were created to wear costumes, they were created living all of them; and (as the reader of _Sartor Resartus_ well knows) the wearing of costumes is, in its figurative sense, one of the most important duties of life, with many people becoming nearly a religion. In Scott we may find out to what extent this universal passion is legitimate and what great-souled love there may be in the heart beating beneath the costume.