"Pope's well known affection for his mother, on which Mr. Thackeray feelingly expatiated, and the love which his friends entertained for him, were introduced as a sentimental relief in describing the character of a man whose career Mr. Thackeray compared to that of a great general, obtaining his end by a series of brilliant conquests."
HOGARTH, SMOLLETT, AND FIELDING.
"In his fifth lecture," says the Leader, "Mr. Thackeray dwelt at great length on Hogarth, and pointed out how much of his success lay in the simple conventional morals of his works; gave a graphic analysis of the Marriage à la Mode and the Idle and Industrious Apprentices; and humorously set forth Hogarth's pretensions to the sublime in historical painting. Smollett was dismissed in a few pleasant paragraphs. Fielding called out the hearty admiration of the author of Vanity Fair; and amidst the panegyric there were some admirable passages, notably one on the scorn and hatred Richardson and Fielding unaffectedly felt for each other, and the sincerity which may animate even the most contemptuous criticism. The opinions Thackeray stamps with his authority, we constantly find open to question; but it is not as a Course of Criticism that these Lectures have their inexpressible charm, and it would be possible for a man to dissent in toto from the views put forth, while at the same time he held them to be among the most delightful lectures he ever listened to."
STERNE AND GOLDSMITH.
In the sixth and last lecture of the course, Mr. Thackeray's subjects were Sterne and Goldsmith. He stigmatized severely all Sterne's relations with women, showed up the sham sensibility which wept through his writings, dwelt on the perilous thing it was to make a market of one's sorrows, and sell the deepest experiences of one's life at so much per volume, and wound up with an emphatic condemnation of the pruriency of Sterne's writings, contrasting that pruriency with the purity of Dickens. All the generosity, sweetness, and improvidence of Goldsmith's Irish nature were earnestly and genially presented.
This course of lectures has been described as "a review of the humorists, by their master," but Mr. Thackeray is not a humorist—at least humor is not his distinguishing quality; he is a cold satirist, sneering at humanity, and in all his writings never exhibiting a spark of the genial fire which should commend an author to the affections of his readers. Gentlemen may be amused by him—he may be even punctilious and sincere in the observance of all honorable conduct—but judging him by his works, he is one of the last men living whom any person with the instincts of a gentleman would admit to his friendship. Some of his books are amazingly clever, but others, as the Kickleburys on the Rhine, are but unredeemable vulgarity. He has been taken up very much by the snobs—a class somewhat remarkable for misapprehensions of their real relations—and we find the snobs of this country as well as of England lauding the satirist as an enemy of their own peculiar caste. This is a mistake: Mr. Thackeray has painted to the life the sentimental snob, indeed, but he is himself a chief of a different and far less endurable class in this division of the race—the snob cynical and supercilious.