The title of one of Thackeray's novels, deemed by the most competent critics his best, and the name of its hero, a chivalrous cavalier of the time of Queen Anne. "Esmond" is pronounced by Prof. Saintsbury to be "among the very summits of English prose fiction, exquisitely written in a marvellous resurrection of eighteenth-century style, touched somehow with a strange modernity and life which make it no pastiche, containing the most brilliant passages of mere incident, and, above all, enshrining such studies of character ... as not four other makers of English prose and verse can show."