assured, shrewd yet unsuspecting calf, that, being given plenty of rope, promptly hanged himself.
In the downfall of Becky there is less of the comic and more of the tragic, though Thackeray does not choose to invest her with enough dignity for tragedy. She is less absurd than Pecksniff or Sir Willoughby for several reasons. She is more human and has the claim of normal humanity on our sympathy; she is the product of circumstances, clearly shown to be largely responsible for her failure both in aspiration and achievement, whereas theirs is gratuitous and without excuse; and she is herself too much of a jester to be patronized by the ridicule of others. She too can keep up appearances to the last, not by reinforcing her hypocrisy but by being able to dispense with it, when it no longer serves, and to mock at it along with everything else. The only real joke she is the victim of comes comparatively early, when she discovers she might become Lady Crawley were she not already daughter-in-law of the coveted and forfeited title.
This theme of a vaulting ambition o'erleaping itself is a favorite with Thackeray, and he did some good apprentice work on it in The Fatal Boots, and Yellowplush Memoirs. In the former the unwelcome wedding present comes as a delightful bit of comic nemesis. But the outcome of the latter, with an accomplished swindler outwitted by his own father, and a helpless woman ruthlessly sacrificed, savors too much of tragedy to be amusing.
Sir Willoughby is only an egoist, not a hypocrite nor a sycophant; and being a gentleman can suffer naught but a gentlemanly humiliation. Such a one is not to be knocked down and taunted in the presence of his little world; he is merely made a subject of gossip and speculation: nor is he to be reduced to sordid material scheming; his intrigues are
