the other extreme, very well."

That is the way to take unfavourable criticisms--not to go declaring
that a man is your enemy because he does not like your book, your
ballads, your idyls, your sermons, what you please. Why cannot
people keep literature and liking apart? Am I bound to think Jones
a bad citizen, a bad man, a bad householder, because his poetry
leaves me cold? Need he regard me as a malevolent green-eyed
monster, because I don't want to read him? Thackeray was not always
true in his later years to these excellent principles. He was
troubled about trifles of criticisms and gossip, bagatelles not
worth noticing, still less worth remembering and recording. Do not
let us record them, then.

We cannot expect for Thackeray, we cannot even desire for him, a
popularity like that of Dickens. If ever any man wrote for the
people, it was Dickens. Where can we find such a benefactor, and
who has lightened so many lives with such merriment as he? But
Thackeray wrote, like the mass of authors, for the literary class--
for all who have the sense of style, the delight in the best
language. He will endure while English literature endures, while
English civilisation lasts. We cannot expect all the world to share
our affection for this humourist whose mirth springs from his
melancholy. His religion, his education, his life in this
unsatisfying world, are not the life, the education, the religion of
the great majority of human kind. He cannot reach so many ears and
hearts as Shakespeare or Dickens, and some of those whom he reaches
will always and inevitably misjudge him. Mais c'est mon homme, one
may say, as La Fontaine said of Moliere. Of modern writers, putting
Scott aside, he is to me the most friendly and sympathetic. Great