personage in his eye, whose high principles, pure life, and unworldly spirit shed their lustre on his pen when his mind conceived such characters as Henry Esmond, Colonel Newcome, and Major Dobbin-so alike and yet so different. I know nothing in literature more healthy than the study of such characters as these, nothing more invigorating, nothing more elevating. It comes like the freshness of a mountain breeze to the man who has been long tied to his desk or his studio; it sends the blood with new vigour through the whole man; it gives life and energy to the exhausted frame; the eye brightens with the light of other days, and the foot treads with a recovered elasticity. "I like reading Thackeray"-how often have I heard the exclamation"I like reading Thackeray, it does one good!" Can more be said in fewer words?

Of course all his men are not of this class. We would not have a novel filled with Colonel Newcomes. There are men worldly enough; military men, too, who model themselves on another ideal. There is our old friend Major Pendennis. Nothing more correct according to his estimate, nothing more respectable, as he judges—“ A man of the world, sir.”

If there was any question about etiquette, society, who was married to whom, of what age such and such a duke was, Pendennis was the man to whom every one appealed. Marchionesses used to drive up to the club and leave notes for him, or fetch him out. He was perfectly affable. The young men liked to walk with him in the Park, or down Pall Mall; for he touched his hat to everybody, and every other man he met was a lord.

There are doubtful military men, too, who shed no moral lustre upon the profession they assume. But it will not do to particularise even classes, much less individuals; for society, in its widest and most general sense, contributes all its elements to complete the pictures of life which Thackeray has photographed for our amusement and instruction.

It would be interesting as well as instructive, had we space at our disposal, to trace the influence of Thackeray's own life upon his writings; interesting, I say, to show how each of its various phases opened up a new class of characters to his view; and instructive, to mark how his quick eye and ready hand caught each as it passed, and treasured it up for future use in due time and place. I will but venture to indicate what I mean. The son of an ancient house, his father occupied a position in the civil service in India, where Thackeray was born. It is true he left the East as a child, and never returned to it again; but the con

nection sufficed to throw him into the society in London of that large, wealthy, and peculiar class of the retired Indian officers, civil and military; and how he turned this to account, such characters as Colonel Newcome, Jos Sidley (the elephantine collector of Boggley Wollah), Uncle Binnie, Mrs. Mackenzie and Rosey, will suffice to show. On his voyage to Europe he landed at St. Helena, and saw Napoleon. How this impressed itself on his young mind he more than once tells us, and Waterloo, in Vanity Fair, is his tribute to that name of power. Again, he was a boy at the Charterhouse; and who does not recal some of his many affectionate reminiscences of that old school, Grey Friars school, as he calls it, wherein he places Clive Newcome and Philip Firmin, and whither, also, among the Poor Brothers of Grey Friars, he brings the old colonel to die. His experiences at Cambridge furnish him with Pendennis' career at Oxbridge (that ingenious combination into a new name of the great English Universities), and develope such characters as Foker and Horace Bloundell. His travels in France, Germany, and Italy-do they not live again in Madame Smolensk, in Paul de Florac and his mother, in Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry, in the Court life at Pumpernickel, in the doings of Baden-Baden, "the prettiest booth in all Vanity Fair," and in Clive's letters from Rome? And then again, the artist life-which trained his hand for the illustrations of his own works, until sickness compelled him to intrust this care to his friend Richard Doyle-did it not give us some of the freshest scenes in Clive Newcome's professional career, and introduce us, among others, to that delicate sketch, which none but a true artist could conceive or execute, young Ridley, and to that special region of Bohemia which lies around Gandish's?

Another phase of Thackeray's career brings us into literary life in chambers, where Pendennis "pursues his law studies with George Warrington; how he does so his own illustration best shows. This opens up another picture of Bohemian life, and makes us acquainted with the rival publishers, Bungay and Bacon, with Mugford, with Charley Shandon, Jack Finucane, Fred Bayham, and a whole host of worthies of the fourth estate -the Press. But beyond these peculiar coteries, Club life brought before Thackeray a wider range of character, and introduced the now popular author into the highest range of society. The literary lion roams in the most exclusive circles, and roars as a lecturer before the most distinguished audiences. Perhaps such gatherings of high and intellectual rank, such crowds of the most distin

guished in every walk of life, were never assembled before or since as graced his Lectures on the Humourists in the world's holiday of 1851; and, if he can be said to have had one failure in life, it was certainly attended with circumstances which glorify it into a sort of triumph: for when he fails in gaining a seat in Parliament for the city of Oxford in 1857, he is beaten only by a very few votes by so distinguished a statesman as Mr. Cardwell. I owe an apology to those among my readers (I trust they are very few in number) to whom the names I have thus mentioned are but names; they will, I hope, bear with me in thus speaking of personages who to me, and, doubtless, to many among us, are as real as- -if not more real than the people we meet daily in life. It will serve at least to show over how wide a range Thackeray's experience extended, and how many and various were the characters he portrayed.

And if it should be said, as indeed it often has been, that his sketchings should rather be called etchings, that his eye was jaundiced, and that the flavour of his sparkling wine is bitter, I would reply: could writings of such a character come from recollections of the tenderest and noblest kind? Could a career so successful as Thackeray's sour his disposition? Could the affectionate regard in which he was held while living, and which clings so lovingly to his memory now that he has been so prematurely snatched away; could this sure token of a kind and generous nature exist had he been the stern, hard satirist that some imagine? Hard, cold, and unfeeling indeed must that heart be which could pay back high appreciation and wide popularity with cynical scorn and deliberate misrepresentation. It is scarcely in human nature to imagine so hideous a monster, and yet such must we conclude our author to have been if we are to receive this estimate of his spirit as the true one. Let us be more just in our judgment. That Thackeray dealt sternly with vice; that he had no sympathy with pretence or meanness in any form or shape; that he lashed the one and laughed at and exposed the other, is true enough. That he was in earnest in his writings, and therefore forcible in his utterances, I allow; had he been less so he might have pleased more, but would he have achieved so much? But surely it was a blunder in ethics, as well as in criticism, to confound vigour of language with bitterness of spirit; and to conclude that, because he censured meanness, he was actuated by ungenerous feelings towards his fellow-men. I suppose the especial work that is pointed out, when this charge is brought against Thackeray, is his Book of Snobs. It may be

said that this is one of his earlier writings, and is not the production of his more practised pen; but I waive this excuse, and prefer facing the charge and vindicating our author. Although it appeared in Punch, it is not intended as a mere joke. Perhaps some of the most earnest writing of that time appeared first in that comic periodical. Thackeray felt (as who has not felt?) that society, in all its various grades, is pervaded by an evil influence, which destroys much that is good and true, and fosters only what is vile and false. He resolved to attack it; and like a brave young knight he put his lance in rest against this giant. But times are changed since St. George went forth against the dragon, and the giant-queller of our day seizes his pen instead of spear, and wages war in the columns of a newspaper instead of in the lists of the tournament. His knowledge of the world had thus early taught him that the moralist of the nineteenth century must be the laughing and not the weeping philosopher, and that if there is one weapon more effective than another it is raillery. The world is strong enough against all other arms, but once raise a laugh against it and it flies in dismay. Paint it as wicked and cruel, and it will scorn you; prove it to be mercenary, and it will despise you; but show it to be ridiculous, and you have it in terror at your feet. This Thackeray knew, and this one instrument he selected from the many at his command. His double task was (1.) to show that snobbery permeated every layer of society, and (2.) to make it and its votaries ridiculous in the eyes of the world. And so he enters upon his herculean task,

and sweeps the Augean stable.

First he defines a Snob: "He who does mean things is a snob, and so is he who meanly admires mean things." Next, he studies snobs like other objects of natural history. He distinguishes between relative and positive snobs. "I mean by positive," he says, "such persons as are snobs everywhere, in all companies, from morning till night, from youth to the grave, being by nature endowed with snobbishness, and others who are snobs only in certain circumstances and relations of life." And so he begins his classification with a royal snob, "Gorgius the Fourth," and depicts every class of snob, from that "great and lamented" monarch downwards or upwards, as you may be pleased to consider. Was not the task thus assumed a noble and generous one, and was it not, moreover, a great success? Depend upon it, the Book of Snobs was not written in vain; it has done a work. "The word snob has taken a place in our honest English vocabulary," our author says in the concluding paper of the series. "We

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can't define it, perhaps; we can't say what it is, any more than we can define wit, or humour, or humbug, but we know what it is. We cannot alter the nature of men and snobs by any force of satire, as by laying ever so many stripes on a donkey's back you can't turn him into a zebra. But we can apply the snob test to our neighbour, and try whether he is conceited and a quack, whether pompous and lacking humility, whether uncharitable and proud in his narrow soul. How does he comport himself in the presence of His Grace the Duke, and how in that of Smith the tradesman ?" Take his summary, and see if it

be not true and void of bitterness:

A Court system that sends men of genius to the second table I hold to be a Snobbish system. A Society that sets up to be polite, and ignores Arts and Letters, I hold to be a Snobbish Society. You, who despise your neighbour, are a Snob; you, who forget your own friends, meanly to follow after those of a higher degree, are a Snob; you, who are ashamed of your poverty, and blush at your calling, are a Snob; as are you who boast of your pedigree and are proud of your wealth.

To laugh at such, I will say in conclusion, applying to our author his own principles, and claiming for him the realising of them, to laugh at such was his business. But he was careful to laugh honestly, to hit no foul blow, and tell the truth when at his very broadest grin, never forgetting what I believe to have been his own leading principle throughout life, "that if FUN IS GOOD, TRUTH IS STILL BETTER, AND LOVE BEst of all."

H. B.