Thackeray was a _master_ in every sense, having as it were, in himself,
a double quantity of being. Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated
so strangely in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son of
Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin brother of the Stratford
Seer. There was nothing in him amorphous and unconsidered. Whatever he
chose to do was always perfectly done. There was a genuine Thackeray
flavor in everything he was willing to say or to write. He detected with
unfailing skill the good or the vile wherever it existed. He had an
unerring eye, a firm understanding, and abounding truth. "Two of his
great master powers," said the chairman at a dinner given to him many
years ago in Edinburgh, "are _satire_ and _sympathy_." George Brimley
remarked, "That he could not have painted Vanity Fair as he has, unless
Eden had been shining in his inner eye." He had, indeed, an awful
insight, with a world of solemn tenderness and simplicity, in his
composition. Those who heard the same voice that withered the memory of
King George the Fourth repeat "The spacious firmament on high" have a
recollection not easily to be blotted from the mind, and I have a kind
of pity for all who were born so recently as not to have heard and
understood Thackeray's Lectures.
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