his country; beloved at his fireside. It has in more. The tired, young kindly wag is sitbeen the fortunate lot of both to give incalcul- ting and looking into space, his mask and his able happiness and delight to the world, which jester's rod lying idly on his knees.

thanks them in return with an immense kindli

ness, respect, affection. It may not be our chance, brother scribe, to be endowed with such merit, or rewarded with such fame. But the rewards of these men are rewards paid to our service. We may not win the baton or epaulettes; but God give us strength to guard the honour of the flag!"

The prayer was granted: he had strength given him always to guard the honour of the flag; and now his name is worthy to be placed beside the names of Washington Irving and Lord Macaulay, as of one no whit less deserving the praise of these noble words.

stand instead of any special portraiture of the The foregoing estimate of his genius must man. Yet we would mention two leading traits of character traceable, to a large extent, in his works, though finding no appropriate place in a literary criticism of them. One was the deep steady melancholy of his nature. He was fond of telling how on one occasion, at Paris, he found himself in a great crowded salon; and looking from the one end across the sea of heads, being in Swift's place of calm in a crowd,* he saw at the other end a strange visage, staring at him with an expression of comical woebegoneness. After We have seen no satisfactory portrait of a little he found that this rueful being was Mr. Thackeray. We like the photographs himself in the mirror. He was not, indeed, better than the prints; and we have an old morose. He was alive to and thankful for daguerreotype of him without his spectacles everyday blessings, great and small; for the which is good; but no photograph can give happiness of home, for friendship, for wit and more of a man than is in any one ordinary music, for beauty of all kinds, for the pleas-often very ordinary-look of him; it is ures of the "faithful old gold pen;" now only Sir Joshua and his brethren who can running into some felicitous expression, now paint a man liker than himself. Laurence's playing itself into some droll initial letter; first drawing has much of his thoroughbred nay, even for the creature comforts. But look, but the head is too much tossed up and his persistent state, especially for the later vif. The photograph from the later drawing half of his life, was profoundly morne-there by the same hand we like better: he is alone, is no other word for it. This arose in part and reading with his book close up to his eyes. This gives the prodigious size and solidity of his head, and the sweet mouth. We have not seen that by Mr. Watts, but if it is as full of power and delicacy as his Tennyson, it will be a comfort.

from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness of mankind. His keen perception of the meanness and vulgarity of the realities around him contrasted with the ideal present to his mind could produce no other effect. This feeling, Though in no sense a selfish man, he had embittered by disappointment, acting on a a wonderful interest in himself as an object harsh and savage nature, ended in the saeva of study, and nothing could be more delight-indignatio of Swift; acting on the kindly ful and unlike anything else than to listen to and too sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, him on himself. He often draws his own it led only to compassionate sadness. In likeness in his books. In the "Fraserians" part, too, this melancholy was the result of by Maclise, in Fraser, is a slight sketch of private calamities. He alludes to these often him in his unknown youth; and there is an in his writings, and a knowledge that his excessively funny and not unlike extrava- sorrows were great is necessary to the perganza of him by Doyle or Leech, in the Month, a little short-lived periodical, edited by Albert Smith. He is represented lecturing, when certainly he looks his best. We give below what is like him in face as well as

fect appreciation of much of his deepest pathos. We allude to them here, painful as the subject is, mainly because they have given rise to stories-some quite untrue, some even cruelly injurious. The loss of his second child in infancy was always an abiding sorrow-described in the " Hoggarty Diamond," in a passage of surpassing tenderness too sacred to be severed from its context. A yet keener and more constantly present affliction was the illness of his wife. He married her in Paris when he was "mewing his mighty youth," preparing for the great career which awaited him. One likes to think on these early days of happiness, when

*"An inch or two above it."

he could draw and write with that loved com- | awful name of God! Light unbearable! mys

:

tery unfathomable! vastness immeasurable! Who are these who come forward to explain the mystery, and gaze unblinking into the depths of the light, and measure the immeasurable vastness to a hair? O name that God's people of old did fear to utter! O light that God's prophet would have perished had he seen! who are these now so familiar with it ?” In ordinary intercourse the same sudden

panion by his side: he has himself sketched the picture "The humblest painter, be he ever so poor, may have a friend watch ing at his easel, or a gentle wife sitting by with her work in her lap, and with fond smiles or talk or silence, cheering his labours." After some years of marriage, Mrs. Thackeray caught a fever, brought on by imprudent exposure at a time when the effects of such ailments are more than usual-"Te Deum" would occur, always brief and ly lasting both on the system and the nerves. She never afterwards recovered so as to be able to be with her husband and children. But she has been from the first intrusted to the good offices of a kind family, tenderly cared for, surrounded with every comfort by his unwearied affection. The beautiful lines in the ballad of the "Bouillabaisse" are well known :

intense, like lightning from a cloudless heaven; he seemed almost ashamed-not of it, but of his giving it expression.

We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December, when he was walking with two friends along the Dean road, to the west of Edinburgh-one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening, such a sunset as one never forgets; "Ah me! how quick the days are flitting! a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the I mind me of a time that's gone, sun, going down behind the Highland hills, When here I'd sit as now I'm sitting, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; beIn this same place-but not alone. tween this cloud and the hills there was a A fair young form was nestled near me, narrow slip of the pure æther, of a tender A dear, dear face looked fondly up, cowslip colour, lucid, and as if it were the And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me, very body of heaven in its clearness; every -There's no one now to share my cup." object standing out as if etched upon the sky. In one of the latest Roundabouts we have The north-west end of Corstorphine Hill, this touching confession :"I own for my with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart part that, in reading pages which this hand of this pure radiance, and there a wooden penned formerly, I often lose sight of the crane, used in the quarry below, was so plactext under my eyes. It is not the words I ed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it see; but that past day; that bygone page was, unmistakable lifted up against the of life's history; that tragedy, comedy, it crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silentmay be, which our little home-company ly. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a was enacting; that merry-making which we tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what shared; that funeral which we followed; all were feeling, in the word "CALVARY!" that bitter, bitter grief which we buried." But all who knew him, know well, and love to recall, how these sorrows were soothed and his home made a place of happiness by his two daughters and his mother, who were his perpetual companions, delights, and blessings, and whose feeling of inestimable loss now will be best borne and comforted by remembering how they were everything to him, as he was to them.

The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did of divine things,-of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Saviour.

There is a passage at the close of the "Roundabout Paper" No. xxIII., De Finibus, in which a sense of the ebb of life is very marked; the whole paper is like a soliloquy. His sense of a higher Power, his rever- It opens with a drawing of Mr. Punch, with ence and godly fear, is felt more than ex- unusually mild eye, retiring for the night; pressed as indeed it mainly should always he is putting out his high-heeled shoes, and be-in every thing he wrote. It comes out before disappearing gives a wistful look into at times quite suddenly, and stops at once, the passage, as if bidding it and all else goodin its full strength. We could readily give night. He will be in bed, his candle out, many instances of this. One we give, as it and in darkness in five minutes, and his occurs very early, when he was probably shoes found next morning at his door, the little more than six-and-twenty; it is from little potentate all the while in his final sleep. the paper, "Madame Sand and the New The whole paper is worth the most careful Apocalypse." Referring to Henri Heine's frightful words, "Dieu qui se meurt," "Dieu est mort," and to the wild godlessness of Spiridion, he thus bursts out:-"O awful,

study; it reveals not a little of his real nature, and unfolds very curiously the secret of his work, the vitality, and abiding power of his own creations; how he "invented a

certain Costigan, out of scraps, heel-taps, | searching out and sounding all its depths. odds and ends of characters," and met the "The dear, the brief, the for ever rememberoriginal the other day, without surprise, in a tavern parlour. The following is beautiful:-"Years ago I had a quarrel with a certain well-known person (I believed a statement regarding him which his friends impart ed to me, and which turned out to be quite incorrect). To his dying day that quarrel was never quite made up. I said to his brother, 'Why is your brother's soul still dark against me? It is I who ought to be angry and unforgiving, for I was in the wrong." Odisse quem læseris was never better contravened. But what we chiefly refer to now is the profound pensiveness of the following strain, as if written with a presentiment of what was not then very far off: "Another Finis written; another milestone on this journey from birth to the next world. Sure it is a subject for solemn cogitation. Shall we continue this story-telling business, and be voluble to the end of our age?" "Will it not be presently time, O prattler, to hold your tongue ?" And thus he ends :

:

"Oh, the sad old pages, the dull old pages; oh, the cares, the ennui, the squabbles, the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again! But now and again a kind thought is recalled, and now and again a dear memory. Yet a few chapters more, and then the last; after which, behold Finis itself comes to an end, and the Infinite begins."

He sent the proof of, this paper to his "dear neighbours," in Onslow Square, to whom he owed so much almost daily pleasure, with his corrections, the whole of the last paragraph in manuscript, and above a first sketch of it also in мs., which is full. er and more impassioned. His fear of "enthusiastic writing" had led him, we think, to sacrifice something of the sacred power of his first words, which we give with its in

terlineations :

:

ed;" these are like a bar out of Beethoven,
deep and melancholy as the sea! He had
been suffering on Sunday from an old and
cruel enemy. He fixed with his friend and
surgeon to come again on Tuesday; but
with that dread of anticipated pain, which is
a common condition of sensibility and genius,
he put him off with a note from "yours un-
faithfully, W. M. T." He went out on Wed-
nesday for a little, and came home at ten.
He went to his room, suffering much, but
declining his man's offer to sit with him.
He hated to make others suffer.
He was
heard moving, as if in pain, about twelve,
on the eve of
"That the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heaven's eternal King,
Of wedded maid, and virgin-mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring.'
Then all was quiet, and then he must have
died-in a moment. Next morning his man
went in, and opening the windows found his
master dead, his arms behind his head, as
if he had tried to take one more breath.
We think of him as of our Chalmers ; found
dead in like manner; the same child-like,
unspoiled open face; the same gentle mouth;
the same spaciousness and softness of nature;
the same look of power. What a thing to
think of,—his lying there alone in the dark,
in the midst of his own mighty London;
his mother and his daughters asleep, and, it
may be, dreaming of his goodness. God
help them, and us all! What would be-
come of us, stumbling along this our path
of life, if we could not, at our utmost need,
stay ourselves on Him?

Long years of sorrow, labour, and pain had killed him before his time. It was found

after death how little life he had to live.

He looked always fresh with that abounding, silvery hair, and his young, almost infantine face, but he was worn to a shadow, and his hands wasted as if by eighty years. With him it is the end of Ends; finite is over, and infinite begun. What we all felt and feel can never be so well expressed as in his own words of sorrow for the early death of Charles Buller

"Who knows the inscrutable design?

Blest be He who took and gave!
Why should your mother, Charles, not mine,
Be weeping at her darling's grave?
We bow to Heaven that will'd it so,
That darkly rules the fate of all,
That sends the respite or the blow,
That's free to give, or to recall.”

THE

NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.

No. LXXX.

FOR MAY, 1864.

ART. L-LORD ELGIN-In Memoriam. refused to leave the sinking ship, inspiring all around them with the cheerfulness and spirit. Ir is not the intention of these few pages to needed for the emergency. There are those give an account even in outline of what Eng- who saw him, by that rare union of tact with land lost in the death of Lord Elgin. Other firmness, of fertile resource with simplicity of pens may hereafter describe at length that aim, which belonged to the character of his singular career, which witnessed the success- race, twice over bring to a prosperous end the ful accommodation of a more varied series of stupid and provoking negotiations, and the novel and entangled situations than has per- no less stupid, and provoking wars of the most haps fallen to the lot of any other statesman inaccessible and intractable of earthly empires, within our own time. -who watched the moderation with which

There must be those who remember and he procured the treaty of Tien-tsin, the deciwho could tell of the reduction of Jamaica to sive energy with which he avenged the digniorder, after the convulsions of the Emancipa- ty of England by the destruction of the Sumtion Act, by the youngest Governor ever sent mer Palace at Pekin, and received the humiliout to command a colony. There must be ation of the Chinese Prince in the heart of those who know how he stood his ground in the Imperial city.

Canada against first one and then another There are those, too, who know what he turbulent faction, and converted the mass of hoped to have done for India, had his life the population from a state of chronic disaf- been spared. There are those-not a fewfection to permanent loyalty. There are who looked further forward still, to the time those who witnessed that decisive stroke by when his long wanderings would at last be which he sent the troops back from Singapore over, and he might have returned to have to Calcutta, in the very crisis of the fate of taken his place high in the councils of his our Eastern Empire, and, when he landed, country, and given to the solution of the found (to use his own famous and long-re- great problems of the government of England, membered expression) but "one face in Cal- the experience and ability which had been cutta unblanched with fear"-the face of the ripened in such lofty positions, in so many a intrepid governor, his own early college friend, trying situation, in each extremity of the Lord Canning, a meeting how romantic and globe.

an issue how momentous ! "It was he," To these, and such as these, we must leave wrote the gallant and lamented Sir William the delineation of the general policy, and the Peel, "who made the change in India. It complicated course, of Lord Elgin's public was the Chinese expedition that relieved life.

Lucknow, relieved Cawnpore, and fought the But it may be possible, within the short battle of the 6th of December." There are compass of the present occasion, to bring those who remember how, when, not for the back some recollections of his last days, some first time, he encountered the terrors of ship-image of his character as he appeared to those wreck, at the Point de Galle, the two ambas- who knew and loved him best, which may fill sadors of England and France sat side by up the vacant space left by his death, not side, unmoved amidst the awful scene, and merely in the memory and the hopes, but in

VOL. XL.

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