I wished to speak to Emily again upon the subject, but she seemed to shrink from any more words about it, so I had to let it go. All I could do was to see that her wardrobe was well supplied, everything being made, that she might not have to sew out of school. But I could not send her father readymade shirts, and I knew she had many a one to make when she was longing for a little rest. So years went on. Her father called her a sweet girl and his lily-flower Emily, and she grew thinner and thinner; but that I think he never saw, he was so much occupied writing an authentic memoir of himself, from his babyhood up to his tenth year.

At length, after I had long been married, and had a little joyous child playing about me, Frank had a fair prospect of being able to support Emily, and their few friends were summoned to the little, musty parlor to witness the marriage. Mr. Tangril, larger than ever, gave her his blessing, and remarked that he hoped her new home would be as serene as that of her childhood had been, and that her new protector would remember how tenderly she had always been watched and cherished.

Frank's eyes flashed, as if such a degree of self-delusion were hardly to be endured, but Emily bowed her patient little head and received her father's

blessing, as if it had been that of a true father.

They took a small house, nearly opposite. Mr. Tangril often passed an evening with them, smoking his pipe with great urbanity in Emily's pretty, curtained parlor, never asking how they enjoyed that act of beneficence. Many a nice little dish did she make and carry to him; the newspaper was always sent over the monent Frank had done with it, although she never read it herself, and I have reason to believe that the old shirt-making went on for the old gentleman under the new roof;-she wished to assist her mother and sisters a little. Frank would not have liked it, if he had ` known it, for he insisted that she should do nothing but rest, and walk, and read, and enjoy herself. He took her short journeys whenever he could, and they seemed to do her a little good. Nothing but his tenderness kept her alive,—but it was too late. She faded away, day by day, and at length there came a day when she was no longer there. They had loved each other when they were children, and Frank had devoted all a boy's ardent spirit to his studies, that he might some time have a home in which they could pass a happy life together, and now she had gone and left him with only a little pale child, looking as if she must soon follow her mother.

As soon as this little, innocent thing could walk alone, she would totter across the road to grandpapa's, and delight to sit on his knee, and hear his pretty stories about birds and flowers. I met him one day leading her out of a baker's shop, with a ginger-cake in her hand. "How touching it is," said a sensitive young lady who was with me, "to see that very large old gentleman leading that very little child, and feeding her so sweetly."

"Yes, very touching," I thought in my indignant heart. "He has let the mother work herself to death, he may well feed the child with gingerbread!"

And the Harmless Old Gentleman led the little child out of sight.

IN laying down the last page of "The

Newcomes," one is tempted to exclaim, in language similar to that the eminent critic, F. Bayham, Esq., used to apply to his good friend and patron, the Colonel: "Brave old Thackeray, noble old soul; if you ain't a trump and a brick, there isn't any on the face of this earth!" With the same restrained ardor in which the brave Colonel himself used to charge at the head of his Indian dragoons upon the Mahrattah cavalry, you charge upon the selfishness and shams of our cozy little societies. With the same dauntless bravery which fills the ditches and heaps the ramparts of Sebastopol with the bodies of your sturdy countrymen, you lay about you on all sides the dead and wounded Cossacks of the false life on which you war. You are a whole regiment in one man,-now pouring a rattling fire of grape into the enemy- -now picking

down a general or a sentinel with a Minié rifle and now exploding grandly like a line of bombs-while ever and anon is heard, in the midst of the more general roar, the deep boom of some thirty-two pounder, which does an amazing deal of damage.

But brave old Colonel Thackeray, noble old soul, you have done a great deal more in "The Newcomes" than discharge your files of musketry and your parks of artillery upon the murderous social Cossacks, sweeping them down by the hundred: you have turned Miss Nightingale, too, and visited the hospitals, and helped the sick, and assuaged the horrors of the dying, and pointed their last hopes to the blessed consolations of Christian goodness and truth. You have shown that you have a great big heart (of which we that knew you did not need to be convinced) though some said that you had none, and that you were only a hard old soldier, sabering people all around you, without human pity or remorse. Yes, indeed, a heart as big as that of the Colonel himself, but with a head a great deal wiser than his; large and generous sympathies, tenderness, a kind love of your brother, and yet a truthfulness which does not allow you to say that the world

is made up of these, and a deep, noble, Christian philosophy, which gives you comfort in the absence of these.

The merits of Thackeray, which have raised him to his eminent position, are quite unanimously allowed. They have been so often dwelt upon, at least, that no one need be ignorant of what they are. First and foremost is his wonderful humor- a quality in which he is not inferior to Swift, Fielding, Dickens, or any other among the illustrious English humorists-and which, in some form or other, steeps and saturates every page of his writings. And this humor is as various as it is deep and fine -now broadly grotesque, as in "Yellowplush's Letters," and some of the contributions to "Punch"-and now as gentle and delicate as the nicest touches of Addison or Goldsmith. Even the exquisite irony of Cervantes scarcely surpasses that of many a passage that might be taken from the "Paris Sketch Book," the "Irish Sketches," or, the "Journey from Cornhill to Cairo." The exuberant fun, the rollicking_animal spirit, which sometimes carries Dickens away into caricature, is not found in Thackeray; but he is more uniformly equable in his vivacity, and is never mastered by, but always masters his genius.

Indeed, the calm and impassive tone which he preserves, as if he were only a spectator of what he describes, quite disinterested and heedless, might be mentioned as the second among those admirable traits which have gained him a name. His scenes and characters never seem to be invented. They come to pass. The author lifts the curtain and the play goes on before us. He comments and ridicules, he sneers and laughs at the motley throng, but he does so as one of the audience. One does not feel that he is responsible for the result; the actors are only about their own work, and the stories tell themselves. Mr. Thackeray is, at best, nothing more than the man at the door, who takes our tickets and points out the best seats. Or, rather, he is the friend who asks us to his chamber, to take a peep out of his win

dow at the busy world of the streets, or into the neighboring windows, while he chats pleasantly at our side about what we both see. Old Pendennis, and Costigan, and Farintosh, and Becky, and Bareacres, and a thousand more, are the people who are passing, or who occupy the parlors and bed-rooms opposite. He knows them all, and tells us who they are, if we are ourselves too dull to guess it from their mere appearance.

It is this remarkable realism which gives his books their aspect of an actual transcript of the life of society. Everybody, on reading them, is quite convinced that the author has seen what he sets forth, and some even suppose that his own agency in the business is little more than that of the camera lucida

which reflects the picture. "He simply puts down the reports of his eyes," exclaims Mr. Keen, "as any well-informed gentleman might do." But, then, my friend, what eyes they are! how they take in every minute particular of the visible appearance, and, having got that, have pierced the entire significance of it! Almost every person, as you hint, is in the habit of looking at the world and its ways with his eyes, and Thackeray does no more; but there is something so sharp, so penetrating, so luminous in his look, that when he sees the thing he sees the whole of it-inside as well as out-and that not only with his eyes, but with his brain and heart. We know of no writer in any literature, whose characterizations of men, and of incidents, are so sharply defined, so nicely and finely cut, so chiseled, as if from the block, like a piece of statuary, and yet so free and flowing, and full of animation, the most unlike statuary of anything in the world. It would be impossible not to recognize his men and women, should we meet them again in the streets, which might easily be. In fact, when we ourselves attended an opening of Parliament in London, or drove through Hyde Park, we saw a great many of them, and were about to accost them on the score of old acquaintance. We heard the Captain sing an Irish song in a cider-cellar in the Strand. Mr. Jeames waited upon us when we dined at and we were introduced personally to a dozen wellknown fellows at the club. We need not mention their names, as, we are sorry to say, they were generally snobs.

But, beside his realism and miraculous insight, Thackeray owes much of his success to his unequaled stylea style which we hardly know how to describe. It is so clear and simple, that it seems at first to possess no really salient qualities-to be a kind of unconscious flow of the author's thoughtsand yet the impressions produced by it are so positive and peculiar, that we are almost forced to regard it as a result of the most elaborate art. But there are no signs of effort about it, no marks of labor, no incompleteness or clumsiness, no commonplaces or affectations of phrase, and no decided polish or brilliancy, but only an easy, off-hand, charming, and irresistible grace, which you would not observe if you did not set about it purposely, in order to analyze your pleasure. Like a stream which runs through a rich meadow, it rolls on quite ignorant of its own sweet murmur and its own gentle ripple. Addison's style suggests it, but Addison's was more artificial; Goethe's had much of the same clearness, but Goethe's was more staid and stately; Fielding's had the same naturalness, but was at times too careless and hurried; and, in fact, we can only speak of it as Thackeray's own, original, vigorous, natural, limpid, idiomatic, and flexible,-a perfect vehicle for the man's peculiar spirit.

All this is admitted, we say-all these qualities are pretty unanimously conceded to him-and yet Thackeray can hardly be called a popular writer. He is not popular in the sense that Dickens is. He is not loved nearly so much as he is admired. He has not taken hold of the hearts of his readers, and become their intimate personal friend. We do not refer to those who would say of him what the criminal said of the judge, and on the same grounds, "Take that man away, for I go in fear of my life because of him;" but to a class, and it cannot be denied that it is a large class, who view him with distrust and aversion, if not with positive dislike, even in the midst of a considerable respect. They allege that his writings, with all their pleasant excellence and inventive energy, with all their wit and pathos, and freshness and sagacity, and wisdom and variety of character, and healthful scrutiny, are offensive from their excessive severity, from their misanthropical views of life, and from their essential injustice in dwelling upon the worse

luxuriant crop of these as its perennial staples! It is not such a society that we see, or that we care to contemplate. It is not in such circles, or under such a guide, that we desire to make the tour of England. We have no doubt that mean and vile creatures in abundance exist,- -we have no doubt that Thackeray exposes them in the truest light; but we believe, and know, too, that much better than these exist, and would be more delectable companions for us and our children. We will leave a P. P. C. for Mr. Thackerays then, and seek a purer and more genial atmosphere.""

As for ourselves, we cannot but think that there were some grounds for these complaints, especially in the earlier books of our author, and that the justifications were not in every respect adequate, not even his own, as given in that noble closing lecture on Charity and Humor. We have certainly felt, in perusing the "Shabby-Genteel Story," the "Luck of Barry Lyndon,' "Men's Wives," and even "Vanity Fair" and "Pendennis," that the weak and wicked phases of human development were brought too much into the light, while the better phases were kept in shadow; as if a man should take the bar-room and the cock-pit for his school, and not the home and the church. But, feeling this, we have not distrusted the genius of the master. We saw that he took no satyr's delight in offensive scenes and graceless characters; that he was even sadder than the reader could be at the horrible prospects before him,-that his task was one conscientiously undertaken, with some deep, great, generous purpose, and that, beneath his seeming scoffs and mockeries, was to be discerned a more searching wisdom and a sweeter, tenderer pathos than we found in any other living writer. We saw that he chastised in no ill-natured or malicious vein, but in love; that he cauterized only to cure; and that, if he wandered through the dreary circles of Inferno, it was because the spirit of Beatrice, the spirit of immortal Beauty, beckoned him to the more glorious Paradiso. Even his deficiencies in the portraiture of woman did not disturb our faith, because we knew of no artist who evinced, though tacitly rather than by words, so thorough a sympathy in the position of woman, and who cherished a more pure, ardent, trembling, and holy reverence

for her true nature. Many a time did he make our heart ache, by a passing glance, it might have been, at the wrongs of some poor wife, teaching the little ones, as she put them to bed, to pray "God bless papa" while the dissolute husband was squandering his all, and their happiness, at the club; and we had yet to recall a single word of his calculated to bring a real womanly woman into contempt. Traces of a latent enthusiasm for excellence, of a fervent admiration of worth, too, broke through the crust of his assumed scepticism and satire, on almost every page, as the golden veins of California crop out of the rough masses of quartz and sand. Besides, however much we might have failed in discovering the extent of Thackeray's genius ourselves, we remembered that the authoress of "Jane Eyre," than whom there was none more capable of appreciating originality and power, had, in dedicating her second edition to him, spoken of him as "an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries yet recognized" (for he was then comparatively unknown), as "the first social regenerator of the day," and as the "very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things." We had too much confidence in the sympathy of genius for genius to allow more superficial judgments to balk our hope.

When we saw Thackeray in person, all doubts of him were dissipated. When we saw that round, good-natured, yet earnest face, when we heard tho manly, yet soft and loving tones of his voice, when we marked in his estimate of illustrious predecessors his intense impatience of the morbid, the hollow and the malignant, and his kindly affection for the simple, the true, and the good, even though erring, when we found how Swift and Sterne and Congreve were not favorites, and how Dick Steele, Hood, and Goldy were,-and how his magnanimous spirit overflowed into delightful recognition of the merits of his compeer and rival, Dickens; and, above all, when we were told, in private life, not only of an honest freedom from conventionalism, which might have been expected, but of a hearty, genial, and exuberant candor and generositywe were glad that we had never yielded to the theory of his excessive cynicism and misanthropy.