When the critics,--the talking critics as well as the writing critics,--began to discuss _Vanity Fair_, there had already grown up a feeling as to Thackeray as an author--that he was one who had taken up the business of castigating the vices of the world.
Scott had dealt with the heroics, whether displayed in his Flora MacIvors or Meg Merrilieses, in his Ivanhoes or Ochiltrees.

Miss Edgeworth had been moral; Miss Austen conventional; Bulwer had been poetical and sentimental; Marryat and Lever had been funny and pugnacious, always with a dash of gallantry, displaying funny naval and funny military life; and Dickens had already become great in painting the virtues of the lower orders.

But by all these some kind of virtue had been sung, though it might be only the virtue of riding a horse or fighting a duel.

Even Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard, with whom Thackeray found so much fault, were intended to be fine fellows, though they broke into houses and committed murders.

The primary object of all those writers was to create an interest by exciting sympathy.