"I grant you," said I, "that Dickens appeals oftener to our susceptible sympathies; but he is _unreal_ in comparison with Thackeray.

The one was a far more correct student of human nature than the other.

Dickens selected exceptionalities and invested them with attributes which we never see possessed by their prototypes whom we may meet in the world.

He gives us either caricature, or pictures of men and women seen through a rose- coloured medium: Thackeray, on the other hand, shows you life _as it is_.

He takes you behind the scenes and lets you perceive for yourself how the `dummies' and machinery are managed, how rough the distemper painting, all beauty from the front of `the house,' looks on nearer inspection, how the `lifts' work, and the `flats' are pushed on; besides disclosing all the secrets connected with masks and `properties.' He is not content in merely allowing you to witness the piece from before the curtain, in the full glory of that distance from the place of action which lends enchantment to the view, and with all the deceptive concomitants of music and limelights and Bengal fire! To adopt another illustration, I should say that Dickens was the John Leech of fictional literature, Thackeray its Hogarth.