Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/75

 Thackeray emphasizes it in his description of that little world in which he had an almost unholy interest:

"Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. And while the moralist * * * professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed; yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such an undertaking."

Later he takes it out on Becky and her kind:

"Such people there are living and flourishing in the world—Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful, too, mere quacks and fools; and it was to combat and expose such as these, no doubt, that laughter was made."

Dickens puts it more abstractly:

"Lest there should be any well-intentioned persons who do not perceive the difference between religion and the cant of religion, piety and the pretense of piety, a humble reverence for the great truths of Scripture and an audacious and offensive