You remember what he wrote in the
preface to "David Copperfield" of "how sorrowfully the pen is laid down
at the close of a two-years' imaginative task, or how an author feels as
if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world,
when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever."
And contrast his superfluously solemn asseveration, "No one can ever
believe this narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the
writing," with the whimsical melancholy of the "Vanity Fair" preface, the
references to the Becky doll and the Amelia puppet. One feels that
Thackeray was the greater Master, in that he took himself less seriously,
and had the finer sense of proportion. But that he lived with his
characters quite as much as his great contemporary may be seen from that
charming Roundabout Paper "De Finibus," where he describes the loneliness
of his study after all those people had gone who had been boarding and
lodging with him for twenty months. They had plagued him and bored him at
all sorts of uncomfortable hours, and yet now he would be almost glad if
one of them would walk in and chat with him as of yore--"an odd,
pleasant, humourous, melancholy feeling." In how much more solemn a mood
Dickens finishes "Our Mutual Friend," congratulating himself on having
been saved--with Mr.
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