less pair, on appealing for aid to the Earl of Crabs and his new-made wife, are spurned with remorseless contempt. What ensues, let Mr. Yellowplush tell in his own peculiar style :—

About three months after, when the season was beginning at Paris, and the autumn leafs was on the ground, my lord, my lady, me and Mortimer, were taking a stroal on the Boddy Balong, the carridge driving on slowly ahead, and us as happy as posbill, admiring the pleasnt woods, and the golden sunset.

My lord was expayshating to my lady upon the exquizet beauty of the sean, and pouring forth a host of butifle and virtuous sentament sootable to the hour. It was dalitefle to hear him. "Ah!" said he, "black must be the heart, my love, which does not feel the influence of a scene like this; gathering, as it were, from those sunlit skies a portion of their celestial gold, and gaining somewhat of heaven with each pure draught of this delicious air!"

Lady Crabs did not speak, but prest his arm, and looked upwards. Mortimer and I, too, felt

some of the infliwents of the sean, and lent on our goold sticks in silence. The carridge drew up close to us, and my lord and my lady sauntered slowly tords it.

Jest at the place was a bench, and on the bench sate a poorly drest woman, and by her, leaning against a tree, was a man whom I thought I'd sean befor. He was drest in a shabby blew coat, with white seems and copper buttons; a torn hat was on his head, and great quantaties of matted hair and whiskers disfiggared his countnints. He was not shaved, and as pale as stone. My lord and lady didn take the slightest notice of him, but past on to the carridge. Me and Mortimer lickwise took our places. As we past, the man had got a grip of the woman's shoulder, who was holding down her head, sobbing bitterly.

No sooner were my lord and lady seated, than they both, with igstrame dellixy and good natur, bust into a ror of lafter, peal upon peal, whooping and screaching, enough to frighten the evening silents.

Deuceace turned round. I see his face now the face of a devvle of hell! Fust, he lookt towards the carridge, and pointed to it with his maimed arm; then he raised the other, and struck the woman by his side. She fell, screaming.

Poor thing! Poor thing!

Often and often has she talked to me and the neighbors regarding her own humility and piety, pointing them out in such a way, that I would defy the most obstinate to disbelieve her.

The same vein of delicate sarcasm runs throughout the tale, where every page is marked by that matchless expressiveness and ease of style for which Mr. Thackeray is the envy of his contemporaries. The hero is as

worthless a scoundrel as ever swindled at ecarté, or earthed his man in a duel. He narrates his own adventures and rascalities with the artless naïveté of a man troubled by no scruples of conscience or misgivings of the moral sense -a conception as daring as the execution is admirable. For a time the reader is carried along, with a smiling admiration of the author's humor, and quiet way of bringing into view the seamy side of a number of respectable shams; but when he finds that he is passed along from rake to swindler, from gambler to ruffian - that the men lie, cheat, and cog the dice, and that the women intrigue, or drink brandy in their tea, or are fatuous fools, the atmosphere becomes oppressive, and even the brilliancy of the wit begins to pall. Yet there are passages in this story, and sketches of character, which Mr. Thackeray has never surpassed. Had these been only mingled with some pictures of people not either hateful for wickedness or despicable for weakness, and in whom we could have felt a cordial interest, the tale might have which he must have seen, with no small won for its author much of the popularity chagrin, carried off by men altogether unfit to cope with him in originality or power.

There is always apparent in Mr. ThackThere is a frightful truthfulness in this pic- eray's works so much natural kindliness, so ture that makes the heart sick. We turn true a sympathy with goodness, that only from it, as we do from the hideous realities some bitter and unfortunate experiences can of an old Flemish painter, or from some dis- explain, as it seems to us, the tendency of his mal revelation in a police report. Still, the mind at this period to present human nature author's power burns into the memory the in its least ennobling aspects. Whenever the image of that miserable woman, and his sim- man himself speaks out in the first person, as ple exclamation at the close tells of a heart in his pleasant books of travel- his "Irish that has bled at the monstrous brutalities to Sketch Book," and his "Journey from Cornthe sex, of which the secret records are aw-hill to Cairo"-he shows so little of the fully prolific, but which the romance writer cynic, or the melancholy Jaques - finds so rarely ventures to approach. If we have hearty a delight in the contemplation of all

himself to the affections of his readers by some portraiture, calculated to take hold of their hearts, and to be remembered with a feeling of gratitude and love! Whatever Mr. Thackeray's previous experiences may have been, however his faith in human goodness may have been shaken, the very influences which he here recognizes of such a writer as Dickens must have taught him how much there is in his fellow-men that is neither weak nor wicked, and how many sunny and hopeful aspects our common life presents to lighten even the saddest heart.

simple pleasures, and so cordially recognizes | most strange to find no effort made to link all social worth and all elevation of character, as to create surprise that he should have taken so little pains in his fictions to delineate good or lofty natures. That this arose from no want of love for his fellow-men, or of admiration for the power which, by depicting goodness, self-sacrifice, and greatness, inspires men with something of these qualities, is obvious - for even at the time when he was writing those sketches to which we have adverted, Mr. Thackeray's pen was recording, with delightful cordiality, the praises of his great rival, Dickens, for these very excelTences, the absence of which in his own writings is their greatest drawback. It is thus he wrote in February, 1844, of Dickens' "Christmas Carol." We quote from Fraser's Magazine."

The salutary influence of Dickens' spirit may, indeed, be traced in the writings of Mr. Thackeray about this period, tempering the bitterness of his sarcasm, and suggesting more pleasing views of human nature. genius of the men is, however, as diverse as

can well be conceived.

The

The mind of the one

is as hopeful as it is loving. That of the other, not less loving, though less expansive in its love, is constitutionally unhopeful. We smile at folly with the one; the other inakes us smile, indeed, but he makes us think too. The one sketches humors and eccentricities which are the casualties of character; the other paints characters in their essence, and with a living truth which will be recognized a hundred years hence as much as now.

Dick

And now there is but one book left in the box, the smallest one, but oh! how much the best of all. It is the work of the master of all the English humorists now alive; the young man who came and took his place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept it. Think of all we owe Mr. Dickens since those half-dozen years, the store of happy hours that he has made us pass, the kindly and pleasant companions whom he has introduced to us; the harmless laughter, the generous wit, the frank, manly, human love which he has taught us to feel! Every month of those years has brought us some ens' serious characters, for the most part, kind token from this delightful genius. His relish of melodramatic extravagance; there books may have lost in art, perhaps, but could is no mistake about Thackeray's being from we afford to wait? Since the days when the the life. Dickens' sentiment, which, when Spectator was produced by a man of kindred mind and temper, what books have appeared that good, is good in the first class, is frequently have taken so affectionate a hold of the English far-fetched and pitched in an unnatural key public as these? They have made millions of rich and poor happy; they might have been locked up for nine years, doubtless, and pruned here and there, and improved (which I doubt), but where would have been the reader's benefit all this time, while the author was elaborating his performance? Would the communion between the writer and the public have been what it is now - something continual, confidential,

something like personal affection?

"God bless him!"

....

Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knows the other or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, As for TINY TIM, there is a certain passage in the book regarding that young gentleman about which a man should hardly venture to speak in print or in public, any more than he would of any other affections of his private heart. There is not a reader in England but that little creature will be a bond of union between the author and him; and he will say of Charles Dickens, as the woman just now, "God bless him!" What a feeling is this for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap!

In a writer who felt and wrote thus, it was

his pathos elaborated by the artifices of the practised writer. Thackeray's sentiment, rarely indulged, is never otherwise than geouine; his pathos is unforced, and goes to the roots of the heart. The style of Dickens, originally lucid, and departing from directness and simplicity only to be amusingly quaint, soon became vicious, affected, and obscure: that of Thackeray has always been manly and transparent, presenting his ideas in the very fittest garb. Dickens' excellence springs from his heart, to whose promptings he trusts himself with an unshrinking faith that kindles a reciprocal enthusiasm in his readers: there is no want of heart in Thackeray, but its utterances are timorous and few, and held in check by the predominance of intellectual energy and the habit of reflection. Thackeray keeps the realities of life always before his eyes; Dickens wanders frequently into the realms of imagination, and, if at times he only brings back, especially of late, fantastic and unnatural beings, we must not forget, that he has added to literature some of its most beautiful ideals. When he moves us to laughter, the laughter is broad and joyous; when he bathes the cheek in tears, he leaves

in the heart the sunshine of a bright after-hope. | true in life, one must believe heartily in both. The mirth which Thackeray moves rarely passes Men who shut up their own hearts in sceptibeyond a smile, and his pathos, while it leaves cism are apt to freeze the fountains of human the eye unmoistened, too often makes the heart love and generosity in others. Mr. Thackeray sad to the core, and leaves it so. Both are must, ere now, have learned, by the most satirists of the vices of the social system; pleasing of all proofs, that there is a world of but the one would rally us into amendment, nobleness, loving-kindness, purity, and selfthe other takes us straight up to the flaw, and denial in daily exercise under the surface of compels us to admit it. Our fancy merely is that society whose distempers he has so skilamused by Dickens, and this often when he fully probed. The best movements of his own means to satirize some grave vice of character nature, in his works, have brought back to him, or the defects of a tyrannous system. It is we doubt not, many a cordial response, calcunever so with Thackeray: he forces the mind lated to inspire him with a more cheerful to acknowledge the truth of his picture, and hope, and a warmer faith in our common huto take the lesson home. Dickens seeks to manity. Indeed, his writings already bear amend the heart by depicting virtue; Thack- the marks of this salutary influence; and it is eray seeks to achieve the same end by expos- not always in depicting wickedness or weaking vice. Both are great moralists; but it is ness that he has latterly shown his greatest absurd to class them as belonging to one power. school. In matter and in manner they are so thoroughly unlike, that when we find this done, as by Sir Archibald Alison, in the review of the literature of the present century in his "History of Europe," we can only attribute the mistake to a limited acquaintance with their works. Of Dickens, Sir Archibald apparently knows something, but he can know little of Mr. Thackeray's writings, to limit his merits, as he does, to "talent and graphic powers," and the ridicule of ephemeral vices. On the contrary, the very qualities are to be found in them which in the same paragraph he defines as essential to the writer for lasting fame "profound insight into the human heart, condensed power of expression," the power of diving deep into the inmost recesses of the soul, and reaching failings universal in mankind," like Juvenal, Cervantes, Le Sage, or Molière.

The unpretending character of Mr. Thackeray's fictions has no doubt arisen in a great degree from a desire to avoid the vices into which the great throng of recent novelists had fallen. While professing to depict the manners and events of every-day life, their works were, for the most part, essentially untrue to nature. The men and women were shadows, the motives wide of the springs of action by which life is actually governed, the sentiments false and exaggerated, the manners deficient in local coloring. Imaginative power was not wanting, but it revelled so wildly, that it merely stimulated the nerves, and left no permanent impression on the heart or understanding. Elevation of sentiment abounded in excess, but the conduct of the heroes and heroines was frequently hard to square with the rules of morality, or the precepts of religion. Bulwer's genius had run wild in pseudo-philosophy and spurious sentimentalism. James was reeling off interminable yarns of florid verbiage. Mrs. Gore's facile pen was reiterating the sickening conventionalisms of socalled fashionable life; and Ainsworth had exalted the scum of Newgate and Hounslow into heroic beings of generous impulses and passionate souls. Things had ceased to be called by their right names; the principles of right and wrong were becoming more and more confounded; sham sentiment, sham morality, sham heroism, were everywhere rampant; and romance-writers every day wandering farther and farther from nature and truth. Their characters were either paragons of excellence, or monsters of iniquity

Sir Archibald comes nearer to the truth when he ascribes to Mr. Thackeray the want of imaginative power and elevation of thought. But what right have we to expect to find the qualities of a Raphael in a Hogarth, or of a Milton in a Fielding? If genius exercises its peculiar gifts to pure ends, we are surely not entitled to ask for more, or to measure it by an inapplicable standard. It cannot be denied that Mr. Thackeray's ideas of excellence, as they appear in his books, are low, and that there is little in them to elevate the imagination, or to fire the heart with noble impulses. His vocation does not lie peculiarly in this direction; and he would have been false to himself had he simulated an exaltation of sentiment which was foreign to his nature. It-grotesque caricatures, or impossible contrahas always seemed to us, however, that he has scarcely done himself justice in this particular. Traces may be seen in his writings of a latent enthusiasm, and a fervent admiration for beauty and worth, overlaid by a crust of cold distrustfulness, which we hope to see give way before happier experiences, and a more extended range of observation. To find the good and

dictions; and the laws of nature, and the courses of heaven, were turned aside to enable the authors to round off their tales according to their own low standard of morality or ambition, and narrow conceptions of the working of God's providence. In criticism and in parody, Mr. Thackeray did his utmost to demolish this vicious state of things. The main

object of his Luck of Barry Lyndon," and his Catharine Hayes," was to show in their true colors the class of rogues, ruffians, and demireps, towards whom the sympathies of the public had been directed by Bulwer, Ainsworth, and Dickens. Mr. Thackeray felt deeply the injury to public morals, and the disgrace to literature, inflicted by the perverted exercise of these writers' powers upon subjects which had hitherto been wisely confined to such recondite chronicles as "The Terrific Register," and the "Newgate Calendar." Never was antidote more required; and the instinct of truth, which uniformly guides Mr. Thackeray's pen, stamped his pictures with the hues of a ghastly reality. Public taste, however, rejected the genuine article, and rejoiced in the counterfeit. The philosophical cut-throat, or the sentimental Magdalene, were more piquant than the low-browed ruffian of the condemned cell, or the vulgar Circe of Shire-lane; and until the mad fit had spent itself in the exhaustion of a false excitement, the public ear was deaf to the remonstrances of its caustic monitor.

of human frailty had been altogether ignored; we had been so drenched with fine writing and poetical sensibility, that he probably thought a little wholesome abstinence in all these respects might not be unprofitable. He plainly had no ambition to go on feeding the public complacency with pictures of life, from which nothing was to be learned — which merely amused the fancy, or inflated the mind with windy aspirations, and false conceptions of human destiny and duty. To place before us the men and women who compose the sum of that life in the midst of which we are moving-to show them to us in such situations as we might see them in any day of our lives

to probe the principles upon which the framework of society in the nineteenth century is based to bring his characters to the test of trial and temptation, such as all may experience to force us to recognize goodness and worth, however unattractive the guise in which they may appear - in a word, to paint life as it is, colored as little as may be with the hues of the imagination, and to teach wholesome truths for every-day necessities, Nor was it only in the literature of New- was the higher task to which Mr. Thackeray gate, as it was well named, that he found now addressed himself. He could not carry matter for reproof and reformation. He had out this purpose without disappointing those looked too earnestly and closely at life, and its who think a novel flat which does not centre issues, not to see that the old and easy man-its interest on a handsome and faultless hero, ner of the novelist in distributing what is with a comfortable balance at his banker's, or called poetical justice, and lodging his favor- a heroine of good family and high imaginaites in a haven of common-place comfort at tive qualities. Life does not abound in such. the close of some improbable game of cross- Its greatest virtues are most frequently hid in purposes, had little in common with the the humblest and least attractive shapes; actual course of things in the world, and could its greatest vices most commonly veiled under convey little either to instruct the understand-a fascinating exterior, and a carriage of uning, to school the affections, or to strengthen questionable respectability. It would have the will. At the close of his "Barry Lyn- cost a writer of Mr. Thackeray's practised don," we find his views on this matter ex-skill little effort to have thrown into his picpressed in the following words: ture figures which would have satisfied the delineations demands of those who insist upon of ideal excellence in works of fiction; but, we apprehend, these would not have been consistent with his design of holding up, as in a mirror, the strange chaos of that Vanity Fair," on which his own meditative eye had so earnestly rested.

There is something naïve and simple in that time-honored style of novel-writing, by which Prince Prettyman, at the end of his adventures, is put in possession of every worldly prosperity, as he has been endowed with every mental and bodily excellence previously. The novelist thinks that he can do no more for his darling hero than to make him a lord. Is it not a poor standard that of the summum bonum? The greatest good in life is not to be a lord, perhaps not even to be happy. Poverty, illness, a humpback, may be rewards and conditions of good, as well as that bodily prosperity which all of us unconsciously set up for worship.

With these views, it was natural that in his first work of magnitude, "Vanity Fair," Mr. Thackeray should strike out a course which might well startle those who had been accustomed to the old routine of caterers for the circulating libraries. The press had already teemed with so many heroes of unexceptionable attractions, personal and mental -so many heroines, in whom the existence

That Mr. Thackeray may have pushed his views to excess, we do not deny. He might, we think, have accomplished his object quite as effectually by letting in a little more sunshadows in some of his characters. Without shine on his picture, and by lightening the any compromise of truth, he might have given us somebody to admire and esteem, without qualifications or humiliating reserves. no human being is exempt from frailties, we need not be reminded. The "divine Imogen" herself, we daresay, had her faults, if the whole truth were told; and we will not undertake to say, that Juliet may not have cost old Capulet a good deal of excusable anxiety. But why dash our admiration by needlessly

That

reminding us of such facts? There is a merely a putting up with something which wantonness in fixing the eye upon some merely might have been worse? With all the laticasual flaw, after you have filled the heart tude of life to choose from, why be evermore and imagination with a beautiful image. It reminding us of the limitations of our happiis a sorry morality which evermore places the ness the compromise of our fairest hopes? death's-head among the flowers and garlands It was a poor and false conception of human of the banquet. In " Vanity Fair," Mr. happiness which placed it always in worldly Thackeray has frequently fallen into this prosperity; but is it not also wide of truth, to error; and he has further marred it by wil- make the good and noble always suffer, and to fully injuring our interest in the only charac- teach that all high desires are vain ters which he puts forward for our regard. they must either be baffled, or, if achieved, Anxious to avoid the propensity of novelists dissolve in disappointment? This is a cheerto make Apollos of their heroes, and paragons less creed, and false as cheerless; and it is by of their heroines, he has run into the opposite bringing it too prominently forward, that extreme, and made Dobbin - the only thor- Mr. Thackeray has exposed himself to a charge oughly excellent.and lovable character in the of cynicism and want of heart. book so ungainly as to be all but objectionable, and his pet heroine, Amelia, so foolishly weak as to wear out our patience.

that

Of these defects, however, no thoughtful reader will accuse him. His writings abound in passages of tenderness, which bespeak a This is all the more vexatious, seeing that heart gentle as a woman's, a sensitiveness only the love of Dobbin for Amelia is the finest less fine; a depth of pity and charity, which delineation of pure and unselfish devotion writers of more pretence to these qualities within the whole range of fiction. Such love never approach. "The still, sad music of in woman has often been depicted, but Mr. humanity" reverberates through all his writThackeray is the first who has had the courage ings. He has painted so much of the bad to essay, and the delicacy of touch to perfect, qualities of mankind, and painted them sɔ well, a portraiture of this lifelong devotion in the that this power has been very generally misopposite sex. It is a favorite theory of his, taken for that delight in the contemplation of that men who love best are prone to be most wickedness or frailty, and that distrust of mistaken in their choice. We doubt the human goodness, which constitute the cynic. truth of the position; and we question the But this is to judge him unfairly. If his pen accuracy of the illustration in Dobbin. He be most graphic in such characters as Becky would have got off his knees, we think, and Sharp, the Marquis of Steyne, Miss Crawley, gone away long before he did; at all events, or Major Pendennis, it is so because such having once gone, the very strength of char- characters present stronger lines than the acter which attached him to Amelia so long quiet charities or homely chivalry in which would have kept him away. Why come back alone it is possible for excellence to express to mate with one whom he had proved unable itself in the kind of life with which his to reach to the height of the attachment which writings deal. Such men and women strike he bore her? Adinirable as are the con- the eye more than the Dobbins, the Helen cluding scenes between Amelia and the Pendennises, and Warringtons of society. major, we wish Mr. Thackeray could have wound up his story in some other way, for nothing is, to our minds, sadder among the grave impressions left by this saddening book, than the thought that even Dobbin has found his ennobling dream of devotion to be a weariness and a vanity. It is as though one had ruthlessly trodden down some single solitary flower in a desert place.

These must be followed with a loving heart and open understanding, before their worth will blossom into view; and it is, to our mind, one of Mr. Thackeray's finest characteristics, that he makes personages of this class so subordinate as he does to the wickedly amusing and amusingly wicked characters which crowd his pages. This, indeed, is one of those features which help to give to his pictures the air of reality in which lies their peculiar charm, and make us feel while we read them as though we were moving among the experiences of our own very life. Here and there amid the struggle, and swagger, and hypocrisy, and time-serving, and vanity, and falsehood of the world, we come upon some true soul, some trait of shrinking goodness, of brave endurance, of noble sacri

Mr. Thackeray has inflicted a similar shock upon his readers' feelings in handing over Laura Bell, with her fresh, frank heart, and fine understanding, to Arthur Pendennis, that aged youth, who is just as unworthy of her as Amelia is of Dobbin. If such things do occur in life — and who has been so fortunate in his experiences as to say they do not?- is the novelist, whose vocation it is to cheer as well as to instruct, only to give us the unhappy fice. So is it in Mr. Thackeray's books. In issues of feelings the highest and purest, and never to gladden us with the hope that all is not disappointment, and our utmost bliss not

the midst of his most brilliant satire, or his most crowded scenes, some simple suggestion of love and goodness occurs, some sweet touch