he writes a lying platitude. In the eighteenth century, and in the twentieth, honor and fame do rise from condition. Now in the presence of the supreme tragic emotions, of death, of suffering, all men are equal. But this social inequality is the region of the comedy of manners, and that is the region in which Thackeray’s comedy moves—the _comédie mondaine_, if not the full _comédie humaine_. It is a world of convention, and he is at home in it, in the world and a citizen of the world. Of course it is not primitively human. Manners are a convention: but so are morals, laws, society, the state, the church. I suppose it is because Thackeray dwelt contentedly in these conventions and rather liked them although he laughed at them, that Shaw calls him an enslaved mind. At any rate, this is what Mr. Howells means when he writes: “When he made a mock of snobbishness, I did not know but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by ridicule. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs: we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it is futile to spurn them, or lash them for trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives which underlie our economic life. . . . This is the toxic property of all Thackeray’s writing. . . . He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different.” In other words, Thackeray was not a socialist, as Mr. Shaw is, and Mr. Howells, and as we are all coming measurably to be. Meanwhile, however, equality is a dream. All his biographers are agreed that Thackeray was honestly fond of mundane advantages. He liked the conversation of clever, well-mannered gentlemen, and the society of agreeable, handsome, well-dressed women. He liked to go to fine houses: liked his club, and was gratified when asked to dine with Sir Robert Peel or the Duke of Devonshire. Speaking of the South and of slavery, he confessed that he found it impossible to think ill of people who gave you such good claret. This explains his love of Horace. Venables reports that he would not study his Latin at school. But he certainly brought away with him from the Charterhouse, or from Trinity, a knowledge of Horace. You recall what delightful, punning use he makes of the lyric Roman at every turn. It is _solvuntur rupes_ when Colonel Newcome’s Indian fortune melts away; and _Rosa sera moratur_ when little Rose is slow to go off in the matrimonial market. Now Horace was eminently a man of the world, a man about town, a club man, a gentle satirist, with a cheerful, mundane philosophy of life, just touched with sadness and regret. He was the poet of an Augustan age, like that English Augustan age which was Thackeray’s favorite; social, gregarious, urban.