When the name of Dickens is mentioned that of Thackeray is also always on the tongue, yet there are large numbers even of the most refined people who do not find Thackeray as good reading as Dickens. It takes a quiet person, with a sense for the intellectual, the sarcastic and the ironical as opposed to the sentimental and humorous, a person with gentlemanly or ladylike instincts, to fall quite into sympathy with Thackeray. But those who love him, love him with an intensity surpassing their feeling for any other author. Thackeray penetrates life with his keen shafts. He is strong because of his reserves, Dickens because of his lack of reserve. Thackeray has polish and elegance of style, he is a master of the best English, and handles it with the ease and grace of inborn, hereditary skill. He could not have made such personal confessions as David Copperfield or Little Dorrit, he could not have laid the colour on with the indiscriminate profusion of Pickwick or the scenes describing Little Nell. He was in no sense a great emotional artist, for only now and then does he lose himself. Such passages as the death of Colonel Newcome are few in Thackeray. He is more often ridiculing foibles than gaining our sympathy for admirable sinners. He bites and stings; and unless we have a fine heart to perceive it we never become aware that he is winning too, that under his cynical perception of the truth of things in this world, especially in the aristocratic society which alone he knew and of which alone he wrote, he has a great and loving heart, a heart tender and forgiving, sympathetic even when he ridicules most unmercifully. It is this great loving heart, so hidden that it can be seen only by those who are truly his friends, that makes Thackeray, the belated exponent of a class in itself repulsive to the average democrat of to-day, in some respects the greatest writer of fiction in the English language. He has grave faults: he is always preaching; he is seldom very hopeful; he had no great belief in himself or his mission in the world. But language in his hands is almost a living and breathing entity, a polished, perfect instrument. And Thackeray teaches the great lessons of restraint, of patience and thoughtful study of life, of the little, nameless compensations which after all to most of us alone make life really worth living. Thackeray was born and brought up as an English gentleman. His parents were married and lived in India, belonging to the great British civil service there. But his father died when he was young, and his mother married again and took him to England. He had his small fortune, and little thought of worrying about money till in middle life he found his substance gone through injudicious speculation, and his pen the principal means by which he could earn a living. He married and had several daughters, but his wife became insane. This was the only cloud on his domestic life.