_Our Mutual Friend_ he put his whole might, working at them with a passion of determination not exceeded by Balzac himself. He had enchanted the public without an effort; he was the best-beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from self-education but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise. We have been told so often to train ourselves by studying the practice of workmen like Gautier and Hugo and imitating the virtues of work like _Hernani_ and _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ and _l'Education Sentimentale_--we have heard so much of the aesthetic impeccability of Young France and the section of Young England that affects its qualities and reproduces its fashions--that it is hard to refrain from asking if, when all is said, we should not do well to look for models nearer home? if in place of such moulds of form as _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ we might not take to considering stuff like _Rizpah_ and _Our Mutual Friend_? Ave atque Vale. Yes, he had many and grave faults. But so had Sir Walter and the good Dumas; so, to be candid, had Shakespeare himself--Shakespeare the king of poets. To myself he is always the man of his unrivalled and enchanting letters--is always an incarnation of generous and abounding gaiety, a type of beneficent earnestness, a great expression of intellectual vigour and emotional vivacity. I love to remember that I came into the world contemporaneously with some of his bravest work, and to reflect that even as he was the inspiration of my boyhood so is he a delight of my middle age. I love to think that while English literature endures he will be remembered as one that loved his fellow-men, and did more to make them happy and amiable than any other writer of his time. THACKERAY His Worshippers.