and meet the other, I shall hate him and leave him. I am not good, Harry my mother is gentle and good, like an angel; I wonder how she should have had such a child. She is weak, but she would die rather than do a wrong; I am stronger than she, but I would do it out of defiance. I do not care for what the parsons tell me with their droning sermons; I used to see them at court, as mean and as worthless as the meanest woman there. O I am sick and weary of the world. I wait but for one thing, and when 'tis done I will take Frank's religion and your poor mother's, and go into a nunnery and end like her.""

Here is a grand scene, in which Lady Castlewood, her son, and Esmond force her into the country to escape the solicitations of the Prince. Lady Castlewood proposes to accompany her:

"For shame!" burst out Beatrix, in a passion of tears and mortification. "You disgrace me by your cruel precautions; my own mother is the first to suspect me, and would take me away as my gaoler. I will not go with you, mother; I will go as no one's prisoner. If I wanted to deceive, do you think I could find no means of evading you? My family suspects me. As those mistrust me that ought to love me most, let me leave them; I will go, but I will go alone to Castlewood, be it. I have been unhappy there and lonely enough; let me go back; but spare me at least the humiliation of setting a watch over my misery, which is a trial I can't bear. Let me go when you will, but alone, or not at all. You three can stay and triumph over my unhappiness, and I will bear it as I have borne it before. Let my gaoler-in-chief go order the coach that is to take me away. I thank you, Henry Esmond, for your share in the conspiracy. All my life long, I'll thank you, and remember you; and you, brother, and you, mother, how shall I show my gratitude to you for your careful defence of my honour?"

'She swept out of the room with the air of an empress, flinging glances of defiance at us all, and leaving us conquerors of the field, but scared, and almost ashamed of our victory. It did indeed seem hard and cruel that we three should have conspired the banishment and humiliation of that fair creature. We looked at each other in silence; 'twas not the first stroke by many of our actions in that unlucky time, which being done, we wished undone. We agreed it was best she should go alone, speaking stealthily to one another, and under our breaths, like persons engaged in an act they felt ashamed in doing.' (Vol. iii. pp. 260, 261.)

But

We are always ordered to admire the beauty of a heroine; but if we obey, it is usually an act of faith. The description is so vague, that we are forced to take her charms on trust. Mr. Thackeray's portrait of Beatrix is so animated and so individualised, that it affects the imagination as if it were painted in colours instead of words :

'She was a brown beauty; that is, her eyes, hair, and eyebrows and eyelashes, were dark: her hair curling with rich fundulations,

and waving over her shoulders; but her complexion was as dazzling white as snow in sunshine; except her cheeks, which were a bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper crimson. Her mouth and chin, they said, were too large and full, and so they might be for a goddess in marble, but not for a woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was the sweetest love song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity; whose foot as it planted itself on the ground was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect grace, agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen,-now melting, now imperious, now sarcastic, there was no single movement of hers but was beautiful. As he thinks of her, he who writes feels young again, and remembers a paragon.* (Vol. ii. pp. 115, 116.)

Beatrix is the only character in Esmond that interests; but there are many that amuse. All of them, indeed, amuse; for, except when he is playing with a doll which he wants to dress up as a good heroine, Mr. Thackeray can produce nothing that is not amusing.

One of the best is Father Holt. Mr. Thackeray has wisely abandoned the demure face and stealthy walk and soft hypocrisy of the conventional Jesuit. His Jesuit is a bold, gay man of the world, frank in his exterior, intrepid in danger, kind and affectionate to those whom it is not his interest to injure, unscrupulous when an instrument is to be obtained or an obstacle is to be removed, and keeping in a separate compartment of his mind, undisturbed by the politics with which the rest is filled, his classical tastes and his theological speculations. Such, we have no doubt, the men of action in the order, the men whose intrigues aimed at establishing or subverting thrones, always must have been and always will be.

His

James the Third has sat to two great painters. Walter Scott took him in middle age, and painted him with a grave and melancholy expression; serious, dignified, and imposing. Mr. Thackeray gives him to us in his youth, before he had been saddened by disappointment and improved by experience. levity, his sensualism, his obstinacy, his ingratitude, his habitual sacrifice of the future to the present, of business to pleasure, and of every person and of every purpose to his own immediate gratification, are features boldly conceived and vigorously executed and Mr. Thackeray has skilfully thrown over the whole a varnish of courtesy and graciousness, which softens and renders almost pleasing the despicable and odious character that lies beneath it. Sir Walter was as much of a Jacobite as it was possible to be in the nineteenth century. Mr. Thackeray's politics are not obtruded. What peeps out of them appears to us to be Whig. James the Third has fared in their hands accordingly.

We cannot quit Esmond without remarking the excellence of the still-life vignettes with which it is adorned. Castlewood House is described over and over, and always with fresh beauty. With great skill it is generally made to form the background of some memorable incident, and imprinted with that incident on the conception of the relator. It is thus introduced, with wonderful effect, just after the parting of Mohun and Castlewood, in apparent amity, but with a fatal quarrel in the heart of each.

'Lord Castlewood stood at the door watching his guest and his people as they went out under the arch of the outer gate. When he was there, Lord Mohun turned once more; my Lord Viscount slowly raised his beaver, and bowed. His face wore a peculiar livid look, Harry thought. He cursed and kicked away his dogs, which came jumping about him—then he walked up to the fountain in the centre of the court, and leaned against a pillar and looked into the basin. As Esmond crossed over to his own room, late the chaplain's, on the other side of the court, and turned to enter in at the low door, he saw Lady Castlewood looking through the curtains of the great window of the drawing room over head at my lord as he stood regarding the fountain. There was in the court a peculiar silence and the scene remained long in Esmond's memory: - the sky bright over head: the buttresses of the building and the sun-dial casting shadow over the gilt memento mori inscribed underneath: the two dogs, a black greyhound and a spaniel nearly white, the one with his face up to the sun, and the other snuffing amongst the grass and stones, and my lord leaning over the fountain, which was plashing audibly. 'Tis strange how that scene and the sound of that fountain remain fixed on the memory of a man who has beheld a hundred sights of splendour, and danger too, of which he has kept no account.' (Vol. i. pp. 313, 314, 315.)

We will extract another, of equal vividness. Esmond is revisiting Castlewood.

He had not seen its ancient grey towers and well-remembered woods for nearly fourteen years, and since he rode thence with my lord, to whom his mistress with her young children by her side waved an adieu. There was the fountain in the court babbling its familiar music, the old hall and its furniture, the carved chair my late lord used, the very flagon he drank from. Esmond's mistress knew he would like to sleep in the little room he used to occupy; 'twas made ready for him, and wall-flowers and sweet herbs set in the adjoining chamber, the chaplain's room.

'Esmond rose up before the dawn, passed into the next room, where the air was heavy with the odour of the wall-flowers, and tried the spring, and whether the window worked still. The spring had not been touched for years, but yielded at length, and the whole fabric of the window sank down. Esmond closed the casement up again, as the dawn was rising over Castlewood village; he could

hear the clinking at the blacksmith's forge yonder among the trees, across the green, and past the river, on which a mist still lay sleeping.' (Vol. iii. pp. 171–174.)

When an author has been long and repeatedly before the public, the verdict of that great tribunal is likely to be a fair one. We believe its judgment on Mr. Thackeray-a judgment which we are not inclined to question-to be this:

That he is a bad constructor of a story; that his openings are tedious and involved, his conclusions abrupt and unsatisfactory; and that the intervening space is filled by incidents with little mutual dependence, and sometimes, as in Pendennis, repetitions of one another. On the other hand, it is admitted that these incidents, taken separately, are often admirable, well imagined, and well told, and amusing exhibitions of the weaknesses or the vices of those who take part in them.

We say weaknesses or vices,' because this is the second reproach addressed to Mr. Thackeray. It is said that his men, if they are not absurd, are tyrants or rogues: that his women, if they are not fools, are intriguers or flirts. This accusation, if it be an accusation, is true as respects his men; and nearly true as respects his women.

If the dramatis persona of Vanity Fair were average samples of the two millions who form the nation that inhabits London, or even if they were samples of what an American would call the Upper Ten Thousand of the Londoners, the London world would be a detestable one. It would be as black morally as it is physically.

Now we are ready to admit that the darkness of Mr. Thackeray's patterns is an artistic defect: that is to say, we think that their texture and general effect would be improved by the introduction of a few threads, not as milkwhite and as superfine as Sir Charles Grandison or Clarissa, but of good average quality and colour; such as Belford, or Colonel Morden, or Miss Howe, or Lady G. But if the objection be not to the artistic effect but to the truth of Mr. Thackeray's characters, if he be accused of giving not merely an unpleasant but a false view of human nature, the answer is this: that in Esmond the scene is laid in what we have already described as the period in which the English character was most demoralised; and that in Vanity Fair the characters are taken almost exclusively from two classes-the pursuers of nothing but wealth, and the pursuers of nothing but pleasure. Mr. Thackeray paints the former as vain, greedy, purseproud, oppressive, and overbearing in prosperity, and grovelling and base in adversity, and envious and suspicious at all times. He describes the latter as frivolous,

heartless, and false, with as much selfishness and vanity and malignity as their Russell-Square neighbours, though concealed under a smoother exterior. And who can say that these pictures are false?

The persons who form the élite of London society, the men whose objects are great and whose pursuits are ennobling, the politicians and men of science, the lawyers and physicians, the men of literature and taste, the poets and artists-all these are as much ignored as if the writer were not aware of their existence. The only allusion to such a class is old Osborne's complaint that his daughter, Mrs. Frederic Bullock, invites him. to meet damned littery men, and keeps the earls and honourables to herself.' Vanity Fair is not a fair sample of the London world taken as a whole, but is a not very exaggerated picture of two portions of it.

We have less to say in defence of Pendennis, for there the field is wider, and yet the result is nearly the same. Even in Pendennis, however, though the hero and his friend Warrington are literary men, their literature is of an humble kind. It is not the literature of statesmen, historians, or philosophers, of those who write for the purpose of influencing, or instructing, or improving mankind; it is not the literature of those whose object, though more selfish, is still magnanimous and splendid, of those who aim at widely diffused and permanent fame;-it is the literature of those who write for bread, who use their pens as a labourer does his spade, or a weaver his shuttle. Unless there be some reason for believing that hack writers in general are better than those whom Mr. Thackeray has described, we have no right to quarrel with his descriptions. There are too in Pendennis one or two persons whom we neither laugh at nor hate. There is Laura, who is intelligent and amiable, though indeed she behaves shamefully to the poor girl from the porter's lodge. There is a Mr. Pynsent, in whom there is no harm. There is a Lady Rockminster, who is sensible and kind, though rather brusque. In fact, however, we must admit that Pendennis is open to the reproach that it professes to be a fair specimen of English morality, and is not so.

Lastly, Mr. Thackeray is accused of lavishing on his heroines undeserved praise. It is said, that having with great skill put together a creature of which the principal elements are undiscriminating affection, ill-requited devotion, ignorant partiality, a weak will and a narrow intellect, he calls on us to worship his poor idol as the type of female excellence. This is true. Mr. Thackeray does all this; it is one of the greatest blemishes in his books. Happily it is a blemish that can be removed with