noses which I received and delivered. I am sure I bore but little malice: and, thank heaven, never wronged a man so much as to be obliged to hate him afterwards. Certain men there were who hated me: but they are gone, and I am here, with a pretty clear conscience, heaven be praised; and little the worse for their enmity.

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The first lieutenant of our ship, Mr. Page, was related to Mrs. Barnard, and this kind lady gave him such a character of her very grateful, humble servant, and narrated my adventures to him so pathetically, that Mr. Page took me into his special favor, and interested some of my messmates in my behalf. The story of the highwayman caused endless talk and jokes against me which I took in good part, and established my footing among my messmates by adopting the plan I had followed at school, and taking an early opportunity to fight a well-known bruiser amongst our company of midshipmen. You must know they called me Soapsuds," "Powderpuff," and like names, in consequence of my grandfather's known trade of hairdresser; and one of my comrades bantering me one day, cried, "I say, Soapsuds, where was it you hit the highwayman?" "There!" said I, and gave him a clean left-handed blow on his nose, which must have caused him to see a hundred blue lights. I know about five minutes afterwards he gave me just such another blow; and we fought it out, and were good friends ever after. What is this? Did I not vow as I was writing the last page yesterday that I would not say a word about my prowess at fisticuffs? You see we are ever making promises to be good, and forgetting them. I suppose other people can say as much.

Before leaving the ship my kind friends once more desired to see me, and Mrs. Barnard, putting a finger to her lip, took out from her pocket a little packet, which she placed in my hand. I thought she was giving me money, and felt somehow disappointed at being so treated by her. But when she was gone to shore I opened the parcel, and found a locket there, and a little curl of glossy black hair. Can you guess whose? Along with the locket was a letter in French, in a large girlish hand, in which the writer said, that night and day she prayed for her dear Denis. And where, think you, the locket is now? where it has been for forty-two years, and where it will remain when a faithful heart that beats under it hath ceased to throb.

At gunfire our friends took leave of the frigate, little knowing the fate that was in store for many on board her. In three weeks from that day what a change! The glorious misfortune which befell us is written in the annals of our country.

On the very evening whilst Captain Pearson was entertaining his friends from Winchelsea, he received orders to sail for Hull, and place himself under the command of the Admiral there. From the Humber we presently were despatched northward to Scarborough. There had been not a little excitement along the whole northern coast for some time past, in consequence of the appearance of some American privateers, who had ransacked a Scottish nobleman's castle, and levied contributions from a Cumberland seaport town. As we were close in with Scarborough a boat came off with letters from the magistrates of that place, announcing that this squadron had actually been seen off the coast. The commodore of this wandering piratical expedition was known to be a rebel Scotchman, who fought with a rope round his neck, to be sure. No doubt many of us youngsters vapored about the courage with which we would engage him, and made certain, if we could only meet with him, of seeing him hang from his own yard-arm. It was Diis aliter visum, as we used to say at Pocock's; and it was we threw deuceace too. Traitor, if you will, was Monsieur Paul John Jones, afterwards knight of his Most Christian Majesty's Order of Merit; but a braver traitor never wore sword.

We had been sent for in order to protect a fleet of merchantmen that were bound to the Baltic, and were to sail under the convoy of our ship and the "Countess of Scarborough," commanded by Captain Piercy. And thus it came about that after being twenty-five days in his Majesty's service, I had the fortune to be present at one of the most severe and desperate combats that has been fought in our or any time.

I shall not attempt to tell that story of the battle of the 23d September, which ended in our glorious Captain striking his own colors to our superior and irresistible enemy. Sir Richard has told the story of his disaster in words nobler than any I could supply, who, though indeed engaged in that fearful action in which our flag went down before a renegade Briton and his motley crew, saw but a very small portion of the battle which ended so fatally for us. It did

not commence till nightfall. How well I remember the sound of the enemy's gun of which the shot crashed into our side in reply to the challenge of our captain who hailed her! Then came a broadside from us the first I had ever heard in battle.

NOTES ON DENIS DUVAL.

THE

HE readers of the Cornhill Magazine have now read the last line written by William Makepeace Thackeray. The story breaks off as his life ended - full of vigor, and blooming with new promise like the apple-trees in this month of May: * the only difference between the work and the life is this, that the last chapters of the one have their little pathetical gaps and breaks of unfinished effort, the last chapters of the other were fulfilled and complete. But the life may be left alone; while as for the gaps and breaks in his last pages, nothing that we can write is likely to add to their significance. There they are; and the reader's mind has already fallen into them, with sensations not to be improved by the ordinary commentator. If Mr. Thackeray himself could do it, that would be another thing. Preacher he called himself in some of the Roundabout discourses in which his softer spirit is always to be heard, but he never had a text after his own mind so much as these last broken chapters would give him now. There is the date of a certain Friday to be filled in, and Time is no more. Is it very presumptuous to imagine the Roundabout that Mr. Thackeray would write upon this unfinished work of his, if he could come back to do it? We do not think it is, or very difficult either. What Carlyle calls the divine gift of speech was so largely his, especially in his maturer years, that he made clear in what he did say pretty much what he would say about anything that engaged his thought; and we have only to imagine a discourse "On the Two Women at the Mill," † to read off upon our minds the sense of what Mr. Thackeray alone could have found language for.

*The last number of "Denis Duval" appeared in the Cornhill Magazine of June, 1864.

"Two women shall be grinding at the mill, one shall be taken and the other left."

Vain are these speculations—or are they vain? Not if we try to think what he would think of his broken labors, considering that one of these days our labors must be broken too. Still, there is not much to be said about it. and we pass on to the real business in hand, which is to show as well as we may what "Denis Duval" would have been had its author lived to complete his work. Fragmen. tary as it is, the story must always be of considerable importance, because it will stand as a warning to imperfect critics never to be in haste to cry of any intellect, "His vein is worked out: there is nothing left in him but the echoes of emptiness." The decriers were never of any importance, yet there is more than satisfaction, there is something like triumph in the mind of every honest man of letters when he sees, and knows everybody must see, how a genius which was sometimes said to have been guilty of passing behind a cloud toward the evening of his day, came out to shine. with new splendor before the day was done. "Denis Duval" is unfinished, but it ends that question. The fiery genius that blazed over the city in "Vanity Fair," and passed on to a ripe afternoon in "Esmond," is not a whit less great, it is only broader, more soft, more mellow and kindly, as it sinks too suddenly in "Denis Duval."

This is said to introduce the settlement of another toohasty notion which we believe to have been pretty generally accepted: namely, that Mr. Thackeray took little pains in the construction of his works. The truth is, that he very industriously did take pains. We find that out when we inquire, for the benefit of the readers of his Magazine, whether there is anything to tell of his designs for "Denis Duval." The answer comes in the form of many most careful notes, and memoranda of inquiry into minute matters of detail to make the story true. How many young novelists are there who haven't much genius to fall back upon, who yet, if they desired to set their hero down in Winchelsea a hundred years ago for instance, would take the trouble to learn how the town was built, and what gate led to Rye (if the hero happened to have any dealings with that place), and who were its local magnates, and how it was governed? And yet this is what Mr. Thackeray did, though his investigation added not twenty lines to the story and no "interest" whatever: it was simply so much conscientious effort to keep as near