Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley are the real heroine and hero of the story.

It is with them that the reader is called upon to interest himself.

It is of them that he will think when he is reading the book.
It is by them that he will judge the book when he has read it.

There was no doubt a feeling with the public that though satire may be very well in its place, it should not be made the backbone of a work so long and so important as this.

A short story such as _Catherine_ or _Barry Lyndon_ might be pronounced to have been called for by the iniquities of an outside world; but this seemed to the readers to have been addressed almost to themselves.