He might have a hundred faults--he was in fact never faultless, except in _Pickwick_, which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing to compare with it and show up faults (if it has any) by the comparison.

But you can read him again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight of a kind given by no other novelist.[21] [21] It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of Dickens's individual novels.

They are almost all well known to almost everybody: and special discussion of them would be superfluous, while their general characteristics and positions in novel-history are singularly uniform and can be described together.
The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is as different from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the two were in their own progress and development.

In fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian parallel between them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a parallel almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in matter almost incommensurable.

In the first place, Dickens, as we have seen, and as Thackeray said (with the generous and characteristic addition "at the head of the whole tribe"), "came and took his place calmly" and practically at once (or with the preliminary only of "Boz") in _Pickwick_.