it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state of society"
always--whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth,
early or middle nineteenth--which existed or might have existed; his
persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the
discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion
among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here.
Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it. Dickens, till
_Great Expectations_ at least, never achieved and I believe never
attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at
last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and
perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift--a
characteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middle
of the century.

It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping
place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book
_Emilia Wyndham_, which has been already more than once referred to. It
was written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of _Vanity Fair_.
But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she
survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was
fifty-five when she wrote _Emilia_. The not unnatural consequence is
that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of
the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing,
could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being
not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A
half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not
merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his
wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an
extravagant establishment, a father practically _non compos_, not a
penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish