Here he enlists the sympathies which one
never feels for perfection; and here, too, he portrays female loveliness
and endurance in his Mrs. Pendennis and Laura. Arthur is a purer Tom Jones
and Laura a superior Sophia Western.
In 1851 he gave a course of lectures, repeated in America the next year,
on "the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century." There was no one
better fitted to write such a course; he felt with them and was of them.
But if this enabled him to present them sympathetically, it also caused
him to overrate them, and in some cases to descend to the standpoint of
their own partial views. He is wrong in his estimate of Swift, and too
eulogistic of Addison; but he is thoroughly English in both.
HENRY ESMOND.--The study of history necessary to prepare these led to his
undertaking a novel on the time of Queen Anne, entitled _The History of
Henry Esmond, Esq., written by himself_. His appreciation of the age is
excellent; but the book, leaving for the most part the comic field in
which he was most at home, is drier and less read than his others; as an
historical presentation a great success, with rare touches of pathos; as a
work of fiction not equal to his other stories.
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