It is perhaps the more extraordinary that, with such intense individuality of handling, such vivid appreciation of the times in which he lived, no writer should have had a greater power of assimilating other times and other manners than Thackeray. It is true that his sympathies were what some might call limited in range. Of classical, mediæval, renaissance times and ways he manifests no great knowledge, and for them he feels but little liking. The eighteenth century, first of all in England and then in Europe at large, was his second province, and he over-ran and possessed it with a thoroughness, just as he represented it with a creative mastery hardly to be paralleled elsewhere. There are many who hold that Esmond, a book in which not merely the manners and to some extent the thought of the time, but its very language and style are reproduced with a skill far surpassing that of any mere parodist, is his very greatest book. And whether this be so or not it is impossible to refuse the most unstinted admiration to the wonderful reconstructions of the past which fill not merely this book but the essays on the Four Georges and the English Humourists with many shorter passages and references elsewhere. Thackeray, as thoroughly a man of his own day as any who walked Pall Mall, lived as it were another life at the same time, a life a hundred years earlier, in which he saw and felt the sights and the sentiments of the reigns of the Georges and of Anne. And there can be little doubt that the infinite pains which he devoted to learning this local colour, and the wonderful success which attended his application of it, determined more than anything else the practice of a whole school, if not of the whole body of novelists who have succeeded him. 7