In the course of his volubility the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay bare his own weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities." In the short contributions to periodicals on which he tried his 'prentice hand, such addresses and conversations were natural and efficacious; but in a larger work of fiction they cause an absence of that dignity to which even a novel may aspire.

You feel that each morsel as you read it is a detached bit, and that it has all been written in detachments.

The book is robbed of its integrity by a certain good-humoured geniality of language, which causes the reader to be almost too much at home with his author.

There is a saying that familiarity breeds contempt, and I have been sometimes inclined to think that our author has sometimes failed to stand up for himself with sufficiency of "personal deportment." In other respects Thackeray's style is excellent.

As I have said before, the reader always understands his words without an effort, and receives all that the author has to give.
There now remains to be discussed the matter of our author's work.