Now men and women like to be painted as Titian would paint them, or Raffaelle,--not as Rembrandt, or even Rubens.
Whether the ideal or the real is the best form of a novel may be questioned, but there can be no doubt that as there are novelists who cannot descend from the bright heaven of the imagination to walk with their feet upon the earth, so there are others to whom it is not given to soar among clouds.

The reader must please himself, and make his selection if he cannot enjoy both.

There are many who are carried into a heaven of pathos by the woes of a Master of Ravenswood, who fail altogether to be touched by the enduring constancy of a Dobbin.

There are others,--and I will not say but they may enjoy the keenest delight which literature can give,--who cannot employ their minds on fiction unless it be conveyed in poetry.

With Thackeray it was essential that the representations made by him should be, to his own thinking, lifelike.