Ay, ay, vanity is truly the motive-power that moves humanity, and it is flattery that greases the wheels.
Flatter them enough upon their absence of vanity, and you can do what you like with them.
Tracts of land and golden mansions, situate in the Celestial City, were often exchanged, at very disadvantageous rates, for a few years' lease of small, dismal, inconvenient tenements in Vanity Fair.
Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity, my manners and deportment became more and more like those of the inhabitants.
I am merely a sojourner here in Vanity Fair, being bound to the Celestial City by the new railroad."
You may travel on it all your lifetime, were you to live thousands of years, and yet never get beyond the limits of Vanity Fair.
If the law stood as it once did in Vanity Fair we should see them grinning through the iron bars of the prison window."
This incident made a considerable impression on my mind, and contributed with other circumstances to indispose me to a permanent residence in the city of Vanity; although, of course, I was not simple enough to give up my original plan of gliding along easily and commodiously by railroad.
At a short distance beyond the suburbs of Vanity we passed the ancient silver mine, of which Demas was the first discoverer, and which is now wrought to great advantage, supplying nearly all the coined currency of the world.
They were the same whom Apollyon and ourselves had persecuted with taunts, and gibes, and scalding steam, at the commencement of our journey--the same whose unworldly aspect and impressive words had stirred my conscience amid the wild revellers of Vanity Fair.
But when the story reaches dramatic moments there is ample compensation; no novelist has more magnificent power in dramatic scenes, such, for instance, as in the climactic series in 'Vanity Fair.' This power is based largely on an absolute knowledge of character: in spite of a delight in somewhat fanciful exaggeration of the ludicrous, Thackeray when he chooses portrays human nature with absolute finality.
On other grounds as well the book ranks almost if not quite beside 'Vanity Pair.' Henry Esmond himself is Thackeray's most thoroughly wise and good character, and Beatrix is as real and complex a woman as even Becky Sharp.
But his honour, out of curiosity, and, perhaps, (if I may speak without
vanity,) partly out of kindness, was determined to see me in my canoe, and got several of his neighbouring friends to accompany him.
