ABSTRACT
We have at once to express, in the warmest terms of praise, our appreciation of the skill and taste with which Esmond is written. Mr Thackeray has caught the true tone of the writers of Queen Anne’s time, and has sprinkled with a duly sparing hand the few peculiarities of grammar proper to them, imitating at the same time their more numerous peculiarities of diction, and throwing in here and there little marks of an elegant, yet what we now should call somewhat of a pedantic, display of classical quotation, with consummate tact. There is no excess, no strain after effect. In his most habitual moods Mr Thackeray is a very easy, polished writer; he has lately been engaged in a close study of the authors upon whose style he founds his present manner; and the result displayed in the volumes before us is a novel of which the literary workmanship commands unstinted praise. We should remark, at the same time, that Mr Thackeray has not so much imitated any single writer, as he has carried his own pen back into Queen Anne’s time; they are his own characteristic trains of thought with which his pages are informed, his own touches of humour with which they are enlivened. The story of the novel, too, is sufficiently ingenious, and although faulty in several respects, is very elegantly constructed, and carried onward through ingenious windings, gratifying constant curiosity until the end. The first volume has a catastrophe as well as the third, and that of the third is unfortunately the least connected with the hero; but great skill in working up an interest is shown in both. Whether by its style, or by the treatment of its subject, in short, the book thoroughly occupies our minds with a sense of strength on the part of the writer, of which the manifestation is made always gracefully. The way in which Mr. Thackeray causes his autobiographer to write of himself modestly in the third person, and the effect which he then produces by an occasional well-timed ‘we,’ or the use of an ‘I,’ when personal feeling might have been supposed to rise above the common level, is an illustration of the elegance of form which marks the whole work. Certain passages also which might, but would not, have been written in Queen Anne’s time, dexterously interpolated here and
there, carry back the fancy of the reader to the period, and are to be regarded rather as excellencies than as faults.
