If there be no such common ground, they will certainly not come into full accord.
There have been recusants who, by a certain acuteness of their own, have partly done so,--wilful recusants; but they have been recusants, not to the extent of discarding grammar,--which no writer could do and not be altogether in the dark,--but so far as to have created for themselves a phraseology which has been picturesque by reason of its illicit vagaries; as a woman will sometimes please ill-instructed eyes and ears by little departures from feminine propriety.

They have probably laboured in their vocation as sedulously as though they had striven to be correct, and have achieved at the best but a short-lived success;--as is the case also with the unconventional female.

The charm of the disorderly soon loses itself in the ugliness of disorder.

And there are others rebellious from grammar, who are, however, hardly to be called rebels, because the laws which they break have never been altogether known to them.

Among those very dear to me in English literature, one or two might be named of either sort, whose works, though they have that in them which will insure to them a long life, will become from year to year less valuable and less venerable, because their authors have either scorned or have not known that common ground of language on which the author and his readers should stand together.
My purport here is only with Thackeray, and I say that he stands always on that common ground.