“IT seems to me those verses shine like the stars.” Thackeray said of Addison’s hymn:—

  Perhaps nothing else ever said of Addison comes so near doing justice to the calm radiance of his genius. But of Thackeray himself with no less propriety than of Addison, it might be said that his whole life work “shines like the stars.” In manliness, in tenderness, in sympathy for all sorts and conditions of men, in freedom from delusions, in hate of cant, in love of truth, he is first among the novelists of England and first without a rival. His “Vanity Fair” is to English fiction what “Hamlet” is to English plays. There is nothing else which resembles it or approaches it. Though, like Shakespeare, Thackeray produced one masterpiece after another, until it seems that his genius had no other limits than that of the universal life of the race, his great novel retains its place of unquestionable eminence among his own works as it does among the works of all other English novelists. In “Vanity Fair” and “Les Miserables” the nineteenth century reached its climaxes of art in prose fiction. They stand with the first part of “Faust,” as the highest products of literary art since the “Paradise Lost.”

  As an essayist Thackeray is always charming for ten minutes at a time. After that, he needs the support of a plot to prevent him from lapsing into the sober sadness of preaching. He was a humorist because human life made him sorrowful. He loved men so well that the suffering of human life filled him with grief too deep for expression, and he became a story teller for the same reason that some silver-haired old man, with his grandchildren on his knees, and the whole sum of the suffering of life in his memory, tells them tales, which they smile to hear, not knowing that the dragons, the giants, and the ogres which the Invincible Prince conquers are to be fought and, it may be, mastered in the struggles between the Divine Soul in them and the Principalities and Powers which oppose it. Such a grandfather is to the children he loves as Thackeray is to all of us. He knows things unspeakable which it is not lawful for any man to utter except in tale and parable.

  He was born July 18th, 1811, at Calcutta, where his father was employed in the civil service of the British imperial government. When about five years old he was sent to England and entered at the Charterhouse School, from which he went (1829) to Trinity College, Cambridge. Leaving Cambridge in 1830 without a degree, he traveled for several years and in 1833 began writing for the National Standard and other periodicals,—including finally Punch, to which he remained a favorite contributor. “The Yellowplush Papers” which contain the most artistic bad spelling in English literature were begun in Fraser’s in 1837. They illustrate Thackeray’s attitude towards the governing classes in England and suggest the motive for “Vanity Fair,” which, when it appeared (1846–48), at once established his place among the greatest writers of England. He was kept busy afterwards until his death, December 24th, 1863. “Pendennis,” 1848–50; “Henry Esmond,” 1852; “The Newcomes,” 1853–55; and “The Virginians,” 1857–59, were accompanied by an uninterrupted succession of stories, sketches, essays, and lectures. “The English Humorists” was originally a series of lectures first delivered in 1851, and “The Four Georges” (1860) is made up of the lectures he delivered during his tour in the United States in 1855. His “Roundabout Papers,” which appeared in 1862, was his last work published during his lifetime, but his “Early and Late Papers” and his “Ballads” were edited and published after his death.

  As a novelist he belongs to the school of Fielding, whom he far surpasses. As a humorist he has learned most from Addison, whom he equals in tenderness and surpasses in breadth, though not comparable with him in delicacy of execution. He is often compared to Dickens, but in their modes of thought and of execution they were wholly different. If Thackeray is to be classed among English men of letters, it must be with Shakespeare, the only English writer who has surpassed him in power to feel and to express the sum total of the pain and pleasure of human life.