The other, with all her beauty and all her brilliance, becomes what we have described,--and marries at last her brother's tutor, who becomes a bishop by means of her intrigues.

Esmond, the hero, who is compounded of all good gifts, after a childhood and youth tinged throughout with melancholy, vanishes from us, with the promise that he is to be rewarded by the hand of the mother of the girl he has loved.
And yet there is not a page in the book over which a thoughtful reader cannot pause with delight.

The nature in it is true nature.

Given a story thus sad, and persons thus situated, and it is thus that the details would follow each other, and thus that the people would conduct themselves.

It was the tone of Thackeray's mind to turn away from the prospect of things joyful, and to see,--or believe that he saw,--in all human affairs, the seed of something base, of something which would be antagonistic to true contentment.