out of me the other day with her coaxing ways. She beats all the
women I have ever seen in the course of all my well-spent life!
They are babies compared to her. I am a green-horn myself and a
fool in her hands--an old fool. She is unsurpassable in lies." His
lordship's admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this proof of
her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing--but getting double
the sum she wanted and paying nobody--it was a magnificent stroke.

In his delineation of character, in the perfect naturalness with which
all his personages act out their respective parts, no novelist is more
realistic than Thackeray. But realism has a broader application. A
novelist who takes every-day life for his subject has not only to give
the stamp of nature to all his scenes and individuals, but he must so
write, that at the end of his book the reader will have the impression
that real life, with its due apportionment of good and evil, of
happiness and grief, has been placed before him. Some readers will
receive that impression from Thackeray's novels; but they will be those
who think that the evil and the unhappiness predominate. So thought the
author himself. But the world in general think differently, and agree
to look upon Thackeray as a satirist.

As such, he ranks in English literature second only to Swift. To the
great Dean, man was a lump of deformity and disease. He saw in humanity
little besides its vice, and painted his species in colors under which
few men have been willing to recognize a portrait. Thackeray's genial
disposition naturally made him far less bitter than Swift. He neither
saw nor portrayed the monstrous vice which excited the hatred of the
satirist of the eighteenth century. To Thackeray, men were weak rather
than bad, selfish rather than vicious. George Osborne braves the
consequences of marrying poor Amelia Sedley, and yet prefers his own