I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a freshman in college, that I really got hold of Thackeray; but when once I had done so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture killed the other. “Dickens knows,” said Thackeray, “that my books are a protest against him: that, if the one set are true, the other must be false.” There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus turning one’s back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense a pleasure and has had so large a share in one’s education. But it is the cruel condition of all growth. The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold, Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old. But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did not find that her fiction and Thackeray’s destroyed each other. I have continued to reread them both ever since and with undiminished satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say that George Eliot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so great. But her message is more gravely intellectual: the psychology of her characters more deeply studied: the problems of life and mind more thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his great contemporary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that Thackeray’s characters are “delineated rather than dissected.” There is little analysis, indeed hardly any literary criticism in his “English Humorists”: only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its technique, or even with its imaginative or expressional power.