It was these that produced the Osbornes, the Dobbins, the Pens, the Clives, and the Newcomes, whom, when he loved them the most, he could not save himself from describing as mean and unworthy.

A somewhat heroic hero of romance,--such a one, let us say, as Waverley, or Lovel in _The Antiquary_, or Morton in _Old Mortality_,--was revolting to him, as lacking those foibles which human nature seemed to him to demand.
The story ends with two sad tragedies, neither of which would have been demanded by the story, had not such sadness been agreeable to the author's own idiosyncrasy.

The one is the ruin of the old colonel's fortunes, he having allowed himself to be enticed into bubble speculations; and the other is the loss of all happiness, and even comfort, to Clive the hero, by the abominations of his mother-in-law.
The woman is so iniquitous, and so tremendous in her iniquities, that she rises to tragedy.

Who does not know Mrs.Mack the Campaigner?
Why at the end of his long story should Thackeray have married his hero to so lackadaisical a heroine as poor little Rosey, or brought on the stage such a she-demon as Rosey's mother?
But there is the Campaigner in all her vigour, a marvel of strength of composition,--one of the most vividly drawn characters in fiction;--but a woman so odious that one is induced to doubt whether she should have been depicted.
The other tragedy is altogether of a different kind, and though unnecessary to the story, and contrary to that practice of story-telling which seems to demand that calamities to those personages with whom we are to sympathise should not be brought in at the close of a work of fiction, is so beautifully told that no lover of Thackeray's work would be willing to part with it.

The old colonel, as we have said, is ruined by speculation, and in his ruin is brought to accept the alms of the brotherhood of the Grey Friars.