Phakathi Winter Olympics ngenyanga eyedlule ngineminyaka ukumesaba njengoba bengibuka umbani bobsledders esheshayo futhi snowboarders highflying. Kwangihlaba umxhwele ubuhle babo wezemidlalo, kodwa Ngahlabeka umxhwele nakakhulu lapho ngicabanga ngesimo ukuqeqeshwa lokujeziselwa kumelwe ukuba kuthathwe ukuze uthole khona. Opening times not supplied. Please phone Gigi Sushi Bar on (03) 9639 2233 Yet despite its consistency and individuality few manners have been less easy not merely to imitate (though no one has imitated it to perfection) but to analyse in any satisfactory way than Thackerays. We may go on noting and examining, as it has been noted and examined above, that easy bantering way which, as he himself says, was wont to produce a rather bewildered expression on the faces of the public. But the soul of it will escape the enumeration and the dissection even more than is usually the case. If any passage can be almost certainly, if nearly every sentence can be probably, recognised as Thackerays, the ear-mark does not lie so much in any particular trick of phrase as in the meaning, or, to speak more accurately still, in the mental attitude of the writer. By what superfluity of foolishness this attitude was ever called or thought cynical it is difficult enough to understand. There might be some ground for calling Thackeray a sentimentalist: there is certainly none for calling him a cynic. But if there was no cynicism, there was an almost intenser sense of the irony of life in him than there was even in Swift, even in Fielding, and he applied this not merely to the greater part of the social life of his time, but also and more noticeably to those characteristics of man which underlie and cause the social life of all times. It is this which makes it impossible that he should ever become obsolete with intelligent readers, this which makes him one of the very greatest of novelists, and, despite a few technical shortcomings in writing, one of the very greatest of writers. 8 CONTENTS · BOOK CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD