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 Beatrix Esmond, whom he pronounced a "doll" and an "eighteenth-century marionette," and compared with whom he found Becky refreshingly real. As for Thackeray's harshness, Mr. Howells condoned it on the score of incomprehension. "His morality is the old conventional morality which we are now a little ashamed of; but in his time and place he could scarcely have had any other. After all, he was a simple soul, and strictly of his period."

This is an interesting point of view. To most of us "Vanity Fair" seems about as simple as "Ecclesiastes," the author of which was also "strictly of his period." Sir Sidney Low, the most trenchant critic whom the fates have raised to champion the incomparable Becky, is by way of thinking that in so far as Thackeray was a moralist, he was unfair to her; but that in so far as he was a much greater artist than a moralist, she emerges triumphant from