what, however, may be said with very little if with any rashness, is that the peculiar circumstances of his earlier years left in more ways than one their mark on his style. if he had regularly trained himself for writing in his youth, or if, like gibbon and others, he had adopted it as a majestic and unhurried diversion for his middle and maturer years, there can be little doubt that his writing would have exhibited fewer signs of the amateurish, not to say the slipshod, than in its earlier stages it actually does. it has been a commonplace (since it was first pointed out some years ago) to observe that thackeray is more than once conquered by the temptation to use and which when there is no precedent relative expressed or even implied in a participle or an elliptic clause; and not a few other things of the same kind might be unearthed. there is no difficulty (especially in that most interesting volume of recovered chaînes de lesclavage which was at last published in 1886 to complete his works) in discovering numerous signs, if not of the young gentleman who was plucked for his degree, as warrington the younger says, at any rate of the young gentleman who did not take it, of the literary aspirant who, as pendennis himself confesses knew very little about politics or history, and had but a smattering of letters. he never became a learned writer, and long after the fire of his genius, the unconquerable and unmistakable quality of his idiosyncrasy, had made him a style among the most delightful in english, it would have been possible for the composition master or the peddling critic to find fault with many of his sentences as clumsy, and perhaps with some as positively incorrect. 3