It intends to go back beyond the work of the man, and to describe his heart.

It says of any satirist so described that he has given himself up to satire, not because things have been evil, but because he himself has been evil.

Hamlet is a satirist, whereas Thersites is a cynic.

If Thackeray be judged after this fashion, the word is as inappropriate to the writer as to the man.
But it has to be confessed that Thackeray did allow his intellect to be too thoroughly saturated with the aspect of the ill side of things.

We can trace the operation of his mind from his earliest days, when he commenced his parodies at school; when he brought out _The Snob_ at Cambridge, when he sent _Yellowplush_ out upon the world as a satirist on the doings of gentlemen generally; when he wrote his _Catherine_, to show the vileness of the taste for what he would have called Newgate literature; and _The Hoggarty Diamond_, to attack bubble companies; and _Barry Lyndon_, to expose the pride which a rascal may take in his rascality.