issued a small Christmas book, Mrs Perkins's Ball. But before this time Thackeray had commenced, in monthly parts, his story of Vanity Fair, a Novel without a Hero, illustrated by himself, or, to use his own expression, 'illuminated with the author's own candles.' The first number appeared in February 1847. Every month added to the popularity of this work; and ere it was concluded it was obvious that Thackeray's probationary period was past-that Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Fitz-Boodle would disappear from Fraser, and their author take his place in his own proper name and person as one of the first of English novelists, and the greatest social satirist of his age. In regularity of story and consistency of detail-though these by no means constitute Thackeray's strength-Vanity Fair greatly excels any of his previous works, while in delineation of character it stands pre-eminent. Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley-one recognised as the 'impersonation of intellect without virtue, and the other as that of virtue without intellect '-are not only perfectly original characters, but are drawn with so much dramatic power, knowledge of life, | and shrewd observation, as to render them studies in human nature and moral anatomy. Amidst all her selfishness, Becky preserves a portion of the reader's sympathy, and we follow her with unabated interest through her vicissitudes as French teacher, governess, the wife of the heavy dragoon, the lady of fashion, and even the desperate and degraded swindler. From part of this demoralisation we could have wished that Becky had been spared by her historian, and the story would have been complete, morally and artistically, without it. But there are few scenes, even the most cynical and humiliating, that the reader desires to strike out all have such an air of truth, and are lively, biting, and humorous. The novelist had soared far beyond the region of mere town-life and snobbism. He had also greatly heightened the interest felt in his characters by connecting them with historical events and places. We have a picture of Brussels in 1815; and as Fielding in Tom Jones glanced at some of the incidents of the Jacobite rising in '45, Thackeray reproduced, as it were, the terrors and anxieties felt by thousands as to the issue of the great struggles at Quatre Bras and Waterloo.

Having completed Vanity Fair, Thackeray published another Christmas volume, Our Street, 1848, to which a companion-volume, Dr Birch and his Young Friends, was added next year. He had also entered upon another monthly serialhis second great work-The History of Pendennis (1849-1850). This was an attempt to describe the gentlemen of the present age-'no better nor worse than most educated men.' And even these educated men, according to the satirist, cannot be painted as they are, with the notorious foibles and selfishness of their education. Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost powers a man. We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the natural in our art.'

This is

rather too broadly stated, but society, no doubt, considers that it would not be benefited by such toleration. Thackeray, however, has done more than most men to strip off conventional disguises and hypocrisies, and he affords glimpses of the interdicted region-too near at times, but

without seeking to render evil attractive. His hero, Pendennis, is scarcely a higher model of humanity than Tom Jones, though the difference in national manners and feelings, brought about during a hundred years, has saved him from some of the descents into which Jones was almost perforce drawn. Thackeray's hero falls in love at sixteen, his juvenile flame being a young actress, who jilts him on finding that his fortune is not what she believed it to be. This boyish passion, contrasted with the character of the actress and that of her father-a drunken Irish captain-is forcibly delineated. Pendennis is sent to the university, gets into debt, is plucked, and returns home to his widowed mother, who is ever kind, gentle, and forgiving, but without any strong sense or firmness-another favourite type of character with Thackeray. The youth then becomes a law student, but tires of the profession, and adopts that of literature. In this he is ultimately successful, and by means of his novels and poetry, aided by the services of his uncle, Major Pendennis, he obtains an introduction into fashionable society. A varied career of this kind affords scope for the author's powers of description, and for the introduction of characters of all grades and pretensions. Major Pendennis-an antiquated beau, a military Will Honeycomb, and a determined tuft-hunteris a finished portrait. The sketches of literary life professional writers-may be compared with a similar description in Humphry Clinker; and the domestic scenes in the novel are true to nature, both in their satirical views of life and in incidents of a tender and pathetic nature. Pendennis was concluded in 1850. In the Christmas of that year Thackeray republished one of his Titmarsh contributions to Fraser, 1846, a mock continuation of Scott's Ivanhoe, entitled Rebecca and Rowena. This piece was certainly not worthy of resuscitation. An original Christmas tale was ready next winter-The Kickleburys on the Rhine, in which Mr M. A. Titmarsh was revived, in order to conduct and satirise the Kicklebury family-mother, daughter, courier, and footman, in all their worldly pride, vulgarity, and grandeur, as they cross the Channel, and proceed to their destination at Rougetnoirburg.' This is a clever little satirefaithful though bitter, as all continental travellers admit; but it was seized upon by the Times newspaper as illustrating that propensity charged upon the novelist of representing only the dark side of human nature-its failings and vices-as if no real goodness or virtue existed in the world. The accusation thus brought against Thackeray he repelled, or rather ridiculed, in a reply entitled An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer, prefixed to a second edition of the Christmas volume. One passage on verbal criticism may be quoted as characteristic.

'It has been customary,' says the critic, 'of late years for the purveyors of amusing literature to put forth certain opuscules, denominated Christmas books, with the ostensible intention of swelling the tide of exhilaration, or other expansive emotions, incident upon the exodus of the old or the inauguration of the new year.' That is something like a sentence (rejoins Titmarsh), not a word scarcely but 's in Latin, and the longest and handsomest out of the whole dictionary. That is proper economy-as you see a buck from Holywell Street put every pinchbeck pin, ring, and chain which he possesses about his shirt, hands, and waistcoat, and then go and

cut a dash in the park, or swagger with his order to the theatre. It costs him no more to wear all his ornaments about his distinguished person than to leave them at home. If you can be a swell at a cheap rate, why not? And I protest, for my part, I had no idea what I was really about in writing and submitting my little book for sale, until my friend the critic, looking at the article, and examining it with the eyes of a connoisseur, pronounced that what I had fancied simply to be a book was in fact 'an opuscule denominated so-and-so, and ostensibly intended to swell the tide of expansive emotion incident upon the inauguration of the new year.' I can hardly believe as much even now-so little do we know what we really are after, until men of genius come and interpret.

In the summer of 1851 Thackeray appeared as a lecturer. His subject was The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century; and all the rank and fashion, with no small portion of the men of letters of London, flocked to Willis's Rooms to hear the popular novelist descant on the lives and works of his great predecessors in fiction from Swift to Goldsmith. The lectures were afterwards repeated in Scotland and in America; and they are now published, forming one of the most delightful little books in the language. Ten thousand copies of the cheap edition of this volume were sold in one week. To Swift, Thackeray was perhaps too severe -to Fielding, too indulgent; Steele is painted en beau in cordial love, and with little shadow; yet we know not where the reader will find in the same limited compass so much just and discriminating criticism, or so many fine thoughts and amusing anecdotes, as those which this loving brother of the craft has treasured up regarding his fellows' of the last century. The Queen Anne period touched upon in these lectures formed the subject of Thackeray's next novel, Esmond, published in three volumes, 1852. The work is in the form of an autobiography. The hero, Colonel Henry Esmond, is a Cavalier and Jacobite, who, after serving his country abroad, mingles with its wits and courtiers at home; plots for the restoration of the Chevalier St George; and finally retires to Virginia, where, in his old age, he writes this memoir of himself and of the noble family of Castlewood, of which he is a member. Historical events and characters are freely introduced. Esmond serves under Marlborough at Blenheim and Ramilies, and we have a portrait of the great general as darkly coloured as the portrait of him by Macaulay. The Chevalier is also brought upon the stage; and Swift, Congreve, Addison, and Steele are among the interlocutors. But the chief interest of the work centres in a few characters-in Esmond himself, the pure, disinterested, and high-minded Cavalier; in Lady Castlewood; and in Lady Castlewood's daughter, Beatrix, a haughty and spoiled, yet fascinating beauty. Esmond woos Beatrix-a hopeless pursuit of many years; but he is finally rejected; and in the end he is united to Lady Castlewood-to the mother instead of the daughter-for whom he had secretly cherished from his boyhood an affection amounting to veneration. It required all Thackeray's art and genius to keep such a plot from revolting the reader, and we cannot say that he has wholly triumphed over the difficulty. The boyish passion is true to nature. At

that period of life the mature beauty is more overpowering to the youthful imagination than any charmer of sixteen. But when Esmond marries he is forty, and the lady is ten years his senior. The romance of life is over. The style of the Queen Anne period is admirably copied in thought, sentiment, and diction, and many striking and eloquent passages occur throughout the work. It is a grand and melancholy story, standing in the same relation to Thackeray's other works that Scott's Bride of Lammermoor does to the Waverley group.

We give one extract-sardonic and sad-from Esmond:

which

Decay of Matrimonial Love.

'Twas easy for Harry to see, however much his lady persisted in obedience and admiration for her husband, that my lord tired of his quiet life, and grew weary, and then testy, at those gentle bonds with which his wife would have held him. As they say the Grand Lama of Thibet is very much fatigued by his character of divinity, and yawns on his altar as his bonzes kneel and worship him, many a home-god grows heartily sick of the reverence with which his family devotees pursue him, and sighs for freedom and for his old life, and to be off the pedestal on which his dependants would have him sit for ever, whilst they adore him, and ply him with flowers, and hymns, and incense, and flattery: so, after a few years of his marriage, my honest Lord Castlewood began to tire; all the high-flown raptures and devotional ceremonies with which his wife, his chief priestess, treated him, first sent him to sleep, and then drove him out of doors; for the truth must be told, that my lord was a jolly gentleman, with very little of the august or divine in his nature, though his fond wife persisted in revering it and besides, he had to pay a penalty for this love, persons of his disposition seldom like to defray; and, in a word, if he had a loving wife, he had a very jealousy; then he broke away from it; then came, no jealous and exacting one. doubt, complaints and recriminations; then, perhaps, promises of amendment not fulfilled; then upbraidings not the more pleasant because they were silent, and only sad looks and tearful eyes conveyed them. Then, perhaps, the pair reached that other stage which is not uncommon in married life, when the woman perceives that the god of the honeymoon is a god no more; only a mortal like the rest of us-and so she looks into her heart, and, lo! vacua sedes et inania arcana. now, supposing our lady to have a fine genius and a brilliant wit of her own, and the magic spell and infatuation removed from her which had led her to worship as a god a very ordinary mortal-and what follows? They live together, and they dine together, and they say My dear' and 'My love' as heretofore; but the man is himself, and the woman herself: that dream of love is over, as everything else is over in life; as flowers and fury, and griefs and pleasures, are over.

་

Then he wearied of this

And

The next work of Thackeray is considered his masterpiece. It is in the old vein-a transcript of real life in the present day, with all its faults and follies, hypocrisy and injustice. The work came recommended by the familiar and inviting title of The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family. Edited by Arthur Pendennis, Esq. It was issued in the monthly form, and was completed in 1855. The leading theme or moral of the story is the misery occasioned by forced and ill-assorted marriages. That unhallowed traffic of the great and worldly is denounced with all the author's moral indignation and caustic severity, and its results are developed

in incidents of the most striking and affecting description. Thus of one fair victim we read:

Lady Clara Newcome.

Poor Lady Clara! I fancy a better lot for you than that to which fate handed you over. I fancy there need have been no deceit in your fond, simple, little heart, could it but have been given into other keeping. But you were consigned to a master whose scorn and cruelty terrified you; under whose sardonic glances your scared eyes were afraid to look up, and before whose gloomy coldness you dared not be happy. Suppose a little plant; very frail and delicate from the first, but that might have bloomed sweetly and borne fair flowers, had it received warm shelter and kindly nurture; suppose a young creature taken out of her home, and given over to a hard master whose caresses are as insulting as his neglect; consigned to cruel usage, to weary loneliness, to bitter insulting recollections of the past; suppose her schooled into hypocrisy by tyranny—and then, quick, let us hire an advocate to roar out to a British jury the wrongs of her injured husband, to paint the agonies of his bleeding heart (if Mr Advocate gets plaintiff's brief in time, and before defendant's attorney has retained him), and to shew society injured through him! Let us console that martyr, I say, with thumping damages; and as for the woman—the guilty wretch!-let us lead her out and stone her. So Lady Clara flies from the custody of her tyrant, but to what a rescue! The very man who loves her, and gives her asylum, pities and deplores her. She scarce dares to look out of the windows of her new home upon the world, lest it should know and reproach her. All the sisterhood of friendship is cut off from her. If she dares to go abroad, she feels the sneer of the world as she goes through it, and knows that malice and scorn whisper behind her. People as criminal, but undiscovered, make room for her, as if her touch were pollution. She knows she has darkened the lot and made wretched the home of the man she loves best, that his friends who see her treat her with but a doubtful respect, and the domestics who attend her, with a suspicious obedience. In the country lanes, or the streets of the country town, neighbours look aside as the carriage passes in which she is splendid and lonely. Rough hunting companions of her husband's come to the table: he is driven perforce to the company of flatterers and men of inferior sort; his equals, at least in his own home, will not live with him. She would be kind, perhaps, and charitable to the cottagers around her, but she fears to visit them, lest they too should scorn her. The clergyman who distributes her charities, blushes and looks awkward on passing her in the village, if he should be walking with his wife or one of his children.

Could anything more sternly or touchingly true be written? The summation of Clara's miseries, item by item, might have been made by Swift, but there is a pathos and moral beauty in the passage that the Dean never reached. The real hero of the novel is Colonel Newcome-a counterpart to Fielding's Allworthy. The old officer's high sense of honour, his simplicity, his never-failing kindness of heart, his antique courtesy as engaging as that of Sir Roger de Coverley-his misfortunes and ruin through the knavery of others-and his death as a 'poor brother' in the Charterhouse, form altogether so noble, so affecting a picture, and one so perfectly natural and life-like, that it can scarcely be even recalled without tears. The author, it was said, might have given a less painful end to the good Colonel, to soothe him after the buffetings of the world. The same remark was made on Scott's treatment of his Jewess Rebecca,

and we have no doubt Thackeray's answer would be that of Scott-'A character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with worldly prosperity. Such is not the recompense which Providence has deemed worthy of suffering merit.' The best of Thackeray's female portraits-his highest compliment to the sex-is in this novel. Ethel Newcome, in her pride and sensibility-the former balancing, and at last overcoming, the weaknesses induced by the latter is drawn with great delicacy and truth; while in the French characters, the family of De Florac and others, we have an entirely new creation-a cluster of originals. The gay roué, Paul de Florac who plays the Englishman in top-boots and buckskins-could only be hit off by one equally at home in French and in English society. Of course there are in The Newcomes many other Personages and classes-as the sanctimonious fop, the coarse and covetous trader, the parasite, the schemer, &c.-who are drawn with the novelist's usual keen insight and minute detail, though possessing fewer features of novelty or interest. Recurring to the pleasant and profitable occupation of lecturing, Thackeray crossed the Atlantic, taking with him four more lectures-The Four Georges-which, after being delivered in the United States in 1855-56, were, on his return, repeated in London, and in most of the large towns in England and Scotland. The Hanoverian monarchs afforded but little room for eulogistic writing or fine moral painting; and the dark shades-the coarseness, immorality, and heartlessness that pervaded the courts of at least the First, Second, and Fourth of the Georges-were exhibited without any relief or softening. George III., as the better man, fared better with the lecturer; and the closing scene, when, old, blind, and bereft of reason, the monarch sank to rest, was described with great pathos and picturesque effect. The society, literature, manners, and fashion of the different periods were briefly touched upon

somewhat in the style of Horace Walpole; and we believe Thackeray contemplated, among his future tasks, expanding these lectures into memoirs of the different reigns. The novelist now aimed at a different sort of public distinction. The representation of the city of Oxford becoming vacant, he offered himself as a candidate-the advocate of all liberal measures-but was defeated by Mr Cardwell (July 1857), the numbers being 1085 to 1018. Before the close of the year Thackeray was at the more appropriate occupation of another serial. The Castlewood family was revived, and in The Virginians we had a tale of the days of George II.-of Chesterfield, Queensberry, Garrick, and Johnson-the gaming-table, coffee-house, and theatre, but with Washington, Wolfe, and the American war in the background. As a story, The Virginians is defective. The incidents hang loosely together, and want progressive interest, but the work abounds in passages of fine philosophic humour and satire. The author frequently stops to moralise and preach sotto voce to his readers, and in these digressions we have some of his choicest and most racy sentences. Youth and love are his favourite themes. There is a healthy natural world both within and without the world of fashion-particularly without. Mere wealth and ton go for nothing in the composition