ABSTRACT
Premising, then, that Pendennis is just as incomplete, just as fragmentary as its predecessor, and therefore no more entitling its author to take rank with our greatest novel-writers than it did, we are quite prepared to agree with the praise which we have heard generally bestowed upon the numbers as they successively appeared. The canvass is marvellously crowded with characters, most of them well and strikingly drawn; the incidents are upon the whole probable, though occasionally of too melodramatic a cast to harmonize with the everyday life and people depicted; the dialogue is appropriate to the speakers and the occasions-smart, grave, sarcastic, or pathetic, by turns, and always, except where slang, fashionable or otherwise, is demanded by dramatic propriety, phrased in pure, terse, idiomatic English. Nor must we omit to mention those passages of reflection in which the author speaks more undisguisedly in his own person: frequent as they are, and greatly as they would mar the effect of a more artistic work, they seem not out of place in this, and are both in style and matter admirable specimens of Mr. Thackeray’s genius.
