He quarrels with none of the laws.

As the lady who is most attentive to conventional propriety may still have her own fashion of dress and her own mode of speech, so had Thackeray very manifestly his own style; but it is one the correctness of which has never been impugned.
I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes.

I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's written language.

Only, where shall we find an example of such perfection?
Always easy, always lucid, always correct, we may find them; but who is the writer, easy, lucid, and correct, who has not impregnated his writing with something of that personal flavour which we call mannerism?
To speak of authors well known to all readers--Does not _The Rambler_ taste of Johnson; _The Decline and Fall_, of Gibbon; _The Middle Ages_, of Hallam; _The History of England_, of Macaulay; and _The Invasion of the Crimea_, of Kinglake?
Do we not know the elephantine tread of _The Saturday_, and the precise toe of _The Spectator_?
I have sometimes thought that Swift has been nearest to the mark of any,--writing English and not writing Swift.

But I doubt whether an accurate observer would not trace even here the "mark of the beast." Thackeray, too, has a strong flavour of Thackeray.