William Makepeace Thackeray

Many of the episodes are of the kind narrated in the fabliaux and nouvelle, but they are strung together by the history of the rogue hero.

This type has persisted with variations, especially the loss of the servant element, down to our own time and reached its highest pitch of art in English in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon.

The Elizabethan romance, represented by such a work as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, is in respect of realism much farther from our novel than the picaresque tale.

But in its abundance of sentiment and frequency of moral purpose, it has elements which the novel of roguery lacked.

Fielding, Smollett, Stern, Goldsmith It is largely this exaggeration of the pathetic and the idealizing of the chief character in order to gain an opportunity for the pathetic that led Fielding to begin his first novel, Joseph Andrews, as a parody of Richardson's Pamela.

Pamela had been pictured as a virtuous maidservant chastely resisting the approaches of her young master, and Fielding planned the story of Pamela's brother Joseph, placed in a corresponding position toward his mistress, to ridicule the absurdities of his predecessor's method.

But he soon became interested in his hero for his own sake, and in this novel, and still more in his masterpiece Tom Jones, he treated human nature with a robust frankness that earned for him the famous compliment of his disciple Thackeray, that he was the last English novelist who dared to draw a man.

Some of Fielding, and perhaps more of Defoe, is to be found in the sordid tales of Tobias Smollett, and in Lawrence Sterne we have the sentimental tendencies of Richardson carried to the last extreme, but mingled in extraordinary fashion with a conscious humor that doubles back on the sentiment, the whole related in a style of remarkable individuality and brilliant wit.

It has been customary, I think, to underrate his abilities.

Thackeray has a most misleading passage about his relation with the Whigs.

At first he made a pretense of having Burke and Fox and Sheridan for his friends.

But how could such men be serious before such an empty scapegrace as this lad? What had these men of genius in common with their tawdry young host of Carleton House? That fribble, the leader of such men as Fox and Burke? That man's opinions about the constitution, about any question graver than the button of a waistcoat or the sauce of a partridge worth anything? The friendship between the prince and the Whig chiefs was impossible.

Gambling and profligacy went on despite the king, but his son led the orgies of extravagance.

His taste was atrocious.

What can be more monstrous than the pavilion at Brighton? Read Thackeray's description of his coming-of-age fed at Carleton House, quoted from the European Magazine, 1784.

The saloon may be styled the chef-d'oeuvre and in every ornament discovers great invention.

She was bright and inquisitive about everything.

Her parents encouraged her interest in books and took turns reading aloud from Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray.

The reading habits became ingrained, and later, when Amelia and Muriel helped in the housework, instead of both of them doing it together, one would read while the other worked.

One of Mr. Earhart's favorite games with his girls was to spring words on them which they had to define without running to a dictionary.