real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the
unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He might have a
hundred faults--he was in fact never faultless, except in _Pickwick_,
which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing to compare with it
and show up faults (if it has any) by the comparison. But you can read
him again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight of a kind
given by no other novelist.[21]

[21] It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of
Dickens's individual novels. They are almost all well known to
almost everybody: and special discussion of them would be
superfluous, while their general characteristics and positions
in novel-history are singularly uniform and can be described
together.

The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is as different
from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the two were in their own
progress and development. In fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian
parallel between them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a
parallel almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in matter
almost incommensurable. In the first place, Dickens, as we have seen,
and as Thackeray said (with the generous and characteristic addition "at
the head of the whole tribe"), "came and took his place calmly" and
practically at once (or with the preliminary only of "Boz") in
_Pickwick_. Whether he ever went further may at least be questioned. But
Thackeray did not take his place at once--in fact he conspicuously
failed to take it for some sixteen years: although he produced, for at
least the last ten of these, work containing indications of
extraordinary power, in a variety of directions almost as extraordinary.