John Sterling, R. Monckton Milnes, and of that distinguished set of men, some of whom had preceded him by a year or two, who formed what was called the Society of the Apostles, though he was not himself a member of that society. It must be confessed that at Cambridge Thackeray gave no signs of distinguished ability. He was chiefly known for his inexhaustible drollery, his love of repartee, and for his humourous command of the pencil. But his habits were too desultory for him to enter the lists of academic competition, and, like, Arthur Pendennis, he left the University without taking a degree. At the age of twenty-one he entered upon London life; he visited Weimar, which he afterwards portrayed as the Court of Pumpernickel; and he was frequently in Paris, where his mother resided since her second marriage. His fortune and position in society seemed to permit him to indulge his tastes and to live as a gentleman at large. But the dream was of short duration. Within a few months he contracted a sleeping partnership which placed his property in the hands of a man who turned out to be insolvent, and the fortune he relied on was lost before he had enjoyed it. The act was one of gross imprudence, no doubt, and he suffered bitterly for it; but it is not true, as has sometimes been supposed, from his lively description of scenes of folly and vice, that he lost his money by his own personal extravagance. Thus then he found himself, at two or three and twenty, with very reduced means, for he had nothing to live on but the allowance his mother and grandmother were able to make him; with no profession, with desultory tastes and habits, and with no definite prospects in life before him. His first scheme was to turn artist and to cultivate painting in the Louvre, for he now resided chiefly with his relations in Paris. But in the art of design he was, in truth, no more than an accomplished amateur. The drawings with which he afterwards illustrated his own books are full of expression, humour, grace, and feeling; but they want the correctness and mastery of the well-trained artist. He turned then, with more hope, at the age of thirty, to the resources of the pen. But it is remarkable that all his literary productions of this, his earlier period, were anonymous; and his literary efforts, though not wanting in pungency and an admirable style, were scattered in multifarious publications, and procured for him but small profit and no fame. These years from thirty to seven-and-thirty, which ought to have been the brightest, were the most cheerless of his existence. He wrote letters in the Times' under the signature of Manlius Pennialinus. He wrote an article on Lord

Brougham in the British and Foreign Review,' which excited
attention. But political writing-even political sarcasm--was
not his forte; and when politics ceased to be a joke, they became
to him a bore. Amongst other experiments he accepted the
editorship of a London daily newspaper, called The Consti-
tutional and Public Ledger,' but-like its namesake, which had
been started and edited, a few years before, by another man of
great literary genius, destined to achieve in after-life a more il-
lustrious career-this journal lingered for ten months and then
expired. The foundation of Punch' was a work after Thacke-
ray's own heart, and he contributed largely to the earlier num-
bers. But it was not till 1841 that he really began to make
his mark in literature, under the well-known pseudonym of
Michael Angelo Titmarsh, a name in which the dream of the
artist still haunted the fancy of the humourist. In the midst
of these perplexities, with that genuine tenderness of feeling
which lay at the bottom of all his sarcasms, Thackeray fell in
love, and married a young lady who might have sat for the
portrait of his own Amelia, but who was not better endowed
than himself with the world's goods, and much less able than
himself to battle with adverse fortune. But his domestic life
was overclouded by a greater calamity than these, and the
malady of his wife threw a permanent cloud over the best
affections of his heart, which were thenceforward devoted to
his children alone. Such was the school in which the genius
of Thackeray was educated. It was not imaginative; it was
not spontaneous; it was the result of a hard and varied expe-
rience of life and the world. It left him somewhat prone to
exaggerate the follies and baseness of mankind, but it never
froze or extinguished his love and sympathy for justice, ten-
In 1847, when he was six-and-thirty
derness, and truth.
years of he braced himself up, for the first time, for a
great and continuous literary effort, and he came before the
world, which hitherto had known him only as a writer of jests
and magazine articles, as the author of Vanity Fair.' His
style, which was the result of the most careful and fastidious
study, had now attained a high degree of perfection. In the
comparison which was naturally drawn between himself and
Dickens, then in the heyday of popularity, it was obvious that
in the command of the English language Thackeray was in-
comparably the master. His style was to the style of Dickens
what marble is to clay; and although he never attained to the
successful vogue of his contemporary, in his lifetime, it was
evident to the critical eye that the writings of Thackeray had
in them that which no time could dim or obliterate.

age,

6

1

With this novel, then, so surprising in its fraukness and in its knowledge of human nature, commenced a career which could know no repression. A mine of gold had been struck, and the nuggets were cast up freely by the hands of the hard and honest worker. In the writing of books admired by every hater of pretence, and the delivery of lectures which were as new in their style and treatment as his novels, the rest of the life of Thackeray passed away. The last fifteen years of it were years of success, celebrity, and comparative affluence. He had attained a commanding position in literature and in society, though it must be acknowledged that except in a very small circle of intimate friends, he rarely put forth any brilliant social qualities. How he impaled snobbery in Punch and gave a new impetus to serial literature by his editorship of the Cornhill Magazine,' are facts too widely disseminated to be dilated upon. A most goodnatured editor, conscientious as well as kind, was Thackeray; but the work was not to his taste, and after a short period he relinquished it at a large pecuniary sacrifice. To that terrible person, the owner of a rejected contribution,' he was frequently most generous, breaking the literary disappointment with the solace of a bank-note in many instances. But he found it painfully difficult to say 'No' when it became imperative to reject would-be contributors, and fled from the field in despair accordingly. To a friend he said on one occasion, 'How can I go into society with comfort? I dined the other day at 's, and at the table were four gentlemen whose mas'terpieces of literary art I had been compelled to decline with thanks.' So he informed his readers for the last time that he would not be responsible for rejected communications." On Christmas Eve, 1863, came the event which touched the heart of Britain with a genuine grief. The not altogether uneventful career of one of the truest and best of men was closed. When it was known that the author of Vanity Fair' would charm the world no longer by his truthful pictures of English life, the grief was what we would always have it be when a leader of the people in war, arts, or letters is stricken down in battle-deep, general, and sincere.

Postponing for the moment a consideration of what we conceive to be the leading characteristics of Thackeray's genius, a certain measure of insight into the author's mind may be gained by a glance at his works-premising that they are not taken in strict chronological order. First, with regard to his more important novels. The key with which he opened the door of fame was undoubtedly Vanity Fair.' Though other writings

of a less ambitious nature had previously come from his pen, until the production of this book there was no evidence that Thackeray would ever assume the high position in letters now unanimously awarded to him. But here, at any rate, was demonstrative proof that a new star had arisen. And yet general as was this belief no intelligible grounds were for a time assigned for it. The novelist himself always regarded his first work as his best; though we think that in this respect he has followed the example of Milton and other celebrated authors, and chosen as his favourite that which is not absolutely the best, though it may be equal to any which succeeded it. Probably the book was one round whose pages a halo had been thrown by various personal circumstances. But the famous yellow covers in which the 'Novel without a Hero' originally appeared were not at first sought after with much avidity. Soon, however, it became known that a new delineator of life was at work in society, and one whose pen was as keen as the dissecting knife of the surgeon. An author had sprung up who dared to shame society by a strong and manly scorn, and by proclaiming that it ought to loathe itself in dust and ashes. The world was not unwilling to read the reflection of its foibles and its vices mirrored with so much wit, originality, and genius. How account otherwise for the favour which the work subsequently attained, when it lacked as a novel many of those characteristics for which novels are most eagerly read? To the initial difficulty of a story without a hero, the writer had voluntarily added that of a lack of consecutiveness and completeness. It was probably begun by the author not only without a hero, but without a plot. We doubt whether any of his novels were written on a plan. Some of them evidently turned under his pen into something quite different from what he had originally intended. His mode of narrative consists in a series of pictures after the manner of Hogarth, but their popularity sufficiently attested their accuracy. There is no one character in Vanity Fair' which can be deemed perfectly satisfactory-not that the public always cares for that, preferring sometimes the most thorough paced villany (viewing authorship as a question of art) to the most superlative virtue. Becky Sharp, the unprincipled governess, has been as unduly detested as Amelia Sedley has been too lavishly praised. There is nothing in the earlier chapters to prove that Becky Sharp was naturally and entirely unprincipled and unscrupulous, and it was evidently the intention of the author to show that society might justly assume a great portion of the responsibility for the after-development of those qualities. With certain ground to work upon, and given conditions as adjuncts,

.

the influence of society on natures like Becky Sharp's would be to encrust them with selfishness and superinduce complete hypocrisy. If heroine there be in the novel it is this clever adventuress, and except on some half-dozen occasions it is scarcely possible to avoid a pity approaching to contempt for the character of Amelia Sedley, who is intended to personify the good element an author generally casts about to discover in concocting a story. Captain Dobbin is overdrawn, and one is well-nigh tempted to wish that he had a little less virtue and a little more selfishness. While we love him he has a tendency to make us angry. The most masterly touches in the volume are those in which the portraits of the Marquis of Steyne and of Sir Pitt Crawley are sketched. The aristocracy furnish the villains and the most contemptible specimens of the race, whilst the excellent persons come from the ranks of the middle class and the poor-their namby-pambyism, however, now and then reducing their claims to our regard. The author speaks for the most part in his own person, and herein lies one of the principal reasons for the success of the book. We feel the satirist at our elbow; he is not enveloped in thick folds in the distance; as we read his trenchant observations and withering sarcasms we can almost see the glances of scorn or of pity which he would assume when engaged in his task. Well might the world exclaim that this was no novice who thus wrote of its meannesses and its glory, its virtues and its vices. This novel lifted him at once, and justly, into the position of one of the ablest writers of subjective fiction. It is especially remarkable in connexion with Vanity Fair' to note the extremely little conversational matter in a tale of this great length; another proof that the strength of the author lay not in the conventional groove of the novelist, but in those other powers of Thackeray-rare observation, an acute penetration of motives, an abhorrence of sham or pretence, and an entirely new and genuine humour.

In Pendennis,' the next great work by Thackeray, there is not only some approach to a consecutive plot, but we are inclined to think finer drawing of individual character than in its predecessor. There is not so much brilliancy of writing, but there is a considerable advance in the art of the novelist. With all the graphic touches which took form in the features of Becky Sharp, Amelia Sedley, and Captain Dobbin, there is nothing in the earlier work to compare with the portraits of George Warrington, Helen Pendennis, and Laura. The hero Arthur: is one who succumbs to the ordinary temptations of life, and has very little attaching to him of that romance in which a hero