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."