the world. The greatest enemies in Italy to the public charities are the priests. These are ever seeking to divert the alms, donations, and bequests of the charitable into ecclesiastical coffers-and yet it is in the churches that beggars and maimed and deformed specimens of humanity most abound.

Notwithstanding this immense scale of public as opposed to State organized relief for the infirm and the poor, and admirably as the institutions SO richly endowed devote their funds' to the cause, there are innumerable districts where their action cannot penetrate, and this, in itself, would seem to necessitate the introduction of some The National Review.

measure corresponding to our own Poor Law.

But the triumphal procession of modern Italy is lengthy enough, and the captives are many and varied. She has, no doubt, other battles to fight and to win before their numbers are complete, and she can rest in proud security in the place she has set herself to attain. Perhaps, in her Triumph of 1961 when a century has witnessed her Unity, other captives will swell the throng following the Victor's car. I will not name them; but there are many Italians, and many lovers of Italy, who are not Italians, who could feel happy to think that Bureaucracy was to be among their number.

Richard Bagot.

As to men, we see them at their whole length in History.

Bolingbroke, Of the Study of History.

This title almost savors of solecism. Thackeray as historian! As well speak of Gibbon as Fielding, or of Smollett the novelist in the same breath with Smollett the chronicler, or of Lord Acton as a romancer-how dry some of those romances might have been! Has not Thackeray himself repeatedly warned us off the course of serious history? Has he not written in one of his picturesque sermons (for he seldom dropped the gown), "We are not the historic Muse, but her Ladyship's attendant, tale-bearer, and valet-dechambre, for whom no man is a hero"? Has he not criticized-he was usually critical "I say to the Muse of History, O venerable daughter of Mnemosyne, I doubt every statement you have ever made since your Ladyship was a

The substance of this essay is a paper read by the author last autumn before the "Titmarsh Club."

Muse"? Has he not pictured himself as one who stood in the crowd to watch the procession, and named himself a "small-beer chronicler"? Does he not love the eighteenth-century taverns and coffee-houses, the gossiping adventures, the little histories of the magazines and romances? Man and manners are his theme, but then these are the very soul of history. And he loves the woman's outlook as much as does his pet Spectator. But then once more, is there history and her story, even when the cynic of research cries "cherchez la femme?" The daily round delights not Thackeray, its delineating artist. "All authors can do," he writes (in the Virginians), “is to depict men out of their business, in their passions, loves, laughters, amusements, hatreds, and what not." And of these he constantly tends to make miniatures. He loves the half-lengths of history and the endearing intimacies of background. He is almost the sole man

of the palette who has turned his graphic hand to grasp the historic pen. Thackeray, then, was no set historian in the solemn sense. He balanced no evidence, he explored no manuscripts, he discussed no treaties or treatises. Nor did he express the full stature of history, its movements and proportions. Yet a real historian he undoubtedly proved, and sometimes a grave and even great one. He humanized the past. Between an historian and an historiographer there is all the difference in the world, and pedants are not portrayers; though, on the other hand, the conventional prudery that shrinks from the naked truth may also impair the vitalizing process. Romance is a mood of mind which the mind itself tempers. Macaulay had put a somewhat metallic romance into history before Thackeray embarked on his creative career. Thackeray, with his great sensitiveness and curiosity, found that he could put history into a rather timid romance; not slipshod, ramshackle history, but history born of infinite pains-like the rest of the human race. He ferreted out everything that old registers, pamphlets, papers, fiction, and literature could tell him, and on these he brought to bear a vivifying power almost as remarkable in its narrower limits as Scott's, though Scott's was an epic gift of ingrained imagination, while Thackeray's mode of bringing to life was tender, sentimental, sensuous-more in the modern vein. Scott inherited his history; it was of his blood, race, and soil. Thackeray forced part of his being into the service of history; he wore her livery and took her orders. And Thackeray was more prejudiced than Scott, just as those who have made their money are sometimes less generous than those who have always been accustomed to it. Scott's historical prejudices were natural to him; Thackeray's in a sense were acquired. He

travelled in a strange country, where the Whig Stanhope was his Baedeker. His rather republican animus colored his views of character even when the dual strain in him of, should it be called, Puritan and Cavalier, or perhaps pharisee and publican, strove for the mastery. Moreover, apart from politics, he was on the whole susceptible rather to broad types than to more delicate shades of character; indeed, all his historical excursions, like most of his other stories, form long variations on the parable of the Good Samaritan. He made for allegory. He was a sort of sentimental Hogarth.

Let me instance something of my meaning in connection with Addison, Steele, and Congreve. In Thackeray's essence lay the double elements of Addison and of Steele, both of the polished "superior person"-the Book of Proverbs in periwig-and of the warmhearted waif, truant, social, gallant, quick-blooded, sympathetic. He does not lead up in shades from one to another, he is each by turns. Thackeray worships Addison, prim and prosperous on his marble pedestal; he loves and idealizes the unvenerable Steele, who could never stagger on to any pedestal at all; but Congreve, that most unwhiggish Whig, half-shocked him. He was too ornate, and he was not a fighting politician: he wrote like a Cavalier and elegant libertine. Because Congreve was a fine gentleman, inclined to be cynical, Thackeray assumed that his life was coarser than Steele's. Yet he never detected Congreve's innate deference to the sex, and has lavished praise on the finest compliment ever paid to woman under a misimpression that it was Steele's. Everyone remembers the passage. It romes in the forty-ninth number of the Tatler, and stands in almost every dictionary of quotations. It was written to honor Lady Elizabeth Hastings under the style of "Aspasia." "To love

her is a liberal education," how noble and chivalrous it sounded on the lips of Steele: Would it have been quite as noble, wholly as chivalrous to Thackeray's thinking if he had known that Congreve wrote it;1 and perhaps he ought to have known, for who but Congreve could have penned that immortal line?

The sort of bias that I am trying to adumbrate leads Thackeray into inconsistencies; lovable, however, because the Steele within him often corrects the Addison, and the sweet play of fancy counteracts the defective judgment. For instance, his dislike of the Stuarts and of the Queen Anne Tories betrays him into a conventional error. His prejudice will play the censor. In his Four Georges he assumes that "had the Queen lasted a month longer, had the English Tories been as bold and resolute as they were clever and crafty," and so forth, James the Third would have reigned over Great Britain-a consummation devoutly to be deprecated. All the virtue, all the firmness is with the impeccable Whigs (of whom, by the way, there were at least four varieties) the Whigs some of whom were Jacobites. The Whigs, moreover, who, in the documents of some twenty years earlier, coveted a Venetian Constitution and a Council of Ten. As a matter of fact only one and that a small section of the extreme Tories, headed by Atterbury and restrained by Bolingbroke, seems to have plotted with any concert for a proclamation of the Pretender. But in Thackeray's Esmond we get a truer approach to the position, though even this is colored. "Not one of the personages about the Queen," he there comments, "had a defined scheme of policy, independent of that private and selfish interest which each was bent on pur

1 Leigh Hunt asserts this in his admirable introduction to his edition of the Restoration Dramatists. He thinks, however, that from its ring of sincerity it could be mistaken for Steele. I venture to disagree.

suing. St. John was for St. John, and Harley for Oxford, and Marlborough for John Churchill always; and according as they could get help from St. Germain's or Hanover, they sent proffers of allegiance to the Princes there, or betrayed one to another; one cause or one sovereign was as good as another to them, so that they could hold the best places under them, and like Lockit and Peachem, the Newgate chiefs in the Rogues' Opera, Mr. Gay wrote afterwards, had each in his hand documents and proofs of treason which would hang the other, only he did not dare to use the weapon for fear of that one which his neighbor carried in his pocket." And then follows the paragraph that rightly ascribes Marlborough's flight to Oxford's discovery of an incriminating paper. That Janus of a general was a Whig hero, and when for a brief space he returned to Georgian half-favor (and the lending of money at high rates to the monarch), it was, of course, as Whig and Hanoverian that he returned. Thackeray does not pursue the subject. He does not tell us how Bolingbroke wished to confront George the First with Land, Church, and State united against the Whigs; that faute de mieur, when the "Troes" or "Tories" had ceased to exist, he was ready to fly to the Pretender; how Oxford, when he had caught out Marlborough, seemed a thief catching a thief: how Bolingbroke so hated Oxford that, apart from any loftier motive, he was certain to be no Jacobite on the death of the Queen. Nor is any real knowledge of the queer complication of parties manifest. Thackeray had not studied deeply enough. He liked broad lines and sharp contrasts. The melodramatic view of Whigs and Tories was good and effective enough for him.

Yet who would quarrel with his mistakes, for they are those, like Shakespeare's, that give the truth of nature

more than the facts of circumstance. And who but Dryasdust would resent his inaccuracies? We get one here, the Rogues' Opera, for the Beggar's Opera, though he may have designed this to add likelihood to his feigned chronicler's record. But there are others which slip from him fluently. Hackman, for example, killed Miss Ray, the actress, not outside Drury Lane, but Covent Garden Theatre. George the First's Mustapha and Mahomet were not "German negroes," but Turks. George the "Gentleman" bought his wigs from Sugden's, not Truefitt's, nor was his head exactly a vapid one. You could hardly speak of "Mrs. Grundy" in the days of the Virginians (she was created by a later play), or perhaps though of this I am not certain—of Harrow football at that period. A worse error, because a material one, is when he makes Bolingbroke, whose charm he recognizes in a delightful conversation with Mrs. Steele, toss off a mad bumper to the memory of the great Protector, his forebear's friend and namesake. St. John drinks toasts to Oliver Cromwell! Why, every word that he wrote contradicts his tyrannical usurpation, while the Letters on History scathe his foreign policy with severe acuteness. Then, again, he misconstrues Chatham's detestation of Bute. He calls it malignity. It was only the scorn of a big man for a pedantic pettifogger. And in that epoch-admirably as he sketches the stupefying stupidities of the Court, he fails to see much beyond George the Third's prejudiced persistence and Charlotte's hard courage. shuts his eyes to the fact that the King was, so to speak, a convert to Eng. land-that he outdid John Bull as a fanatic for his cause. He is blind to the Queen's cunning and meanness, nor is his account of George the Fourth more than a flimsy outlook on a flimsy He ignores his natural quick

man.

He

The

ness and ability, his thwarted ambitions, and warped good nature. One last example may close the list. When George the heartless heard of the death of Georgiana, the peerless, "We have lost," he exclaimed. "the best-bred woman in England." Thackeray contrasts this with Charles Fox's tribute, "We have lost the best heart in England." "Noble Charles Fox!" exclaims Thackeray, with all the fervor that Holland House inspired in Macaulay. motives of these two verdicts quite escaped him. The Regent had never forgiven the fair Duchess's preference in her youth for the handsome young Grey-"the boy who tossed his head so high." And his utterance on her death was at least magnanimous. Fox had been petted, pampered, heroized, helped. Was his praise, then, quite so noble, and, indeed, was the amiable Charles James Fox quite so noble at all?

But

What, however, are such pin-points, compared with the inner truth, his intense variety of background, and his artistic atmosphere. He can hit off a type to the life, and by a word. When he speaks of Horace Walpole's "dandified treble," the whole mannikin is there, though Thackeray mimics his letters less ably than he copies Addison in the Spectator. And then there is his wonderful skill in terse, vivid, pathetic, historical connection. It may be remembered how he links Duke William of Celles' madness, blindness, and love of music to his remote offspring, George the Third's. He recalls the Duke's "glimpses of mental light when he would bid the musicians play the psalm tunes which he loved." "One thinks," he proceeds, "of a descendant of his two hundred years afterwards, blind, old, lost of wits, singing Handel in Windsor Tower." Nor should we omit the vibrating atmosphere of poetical insight with which he surrounds his supreme moments. Take the conversa

tion after Castlewood had implored the Pretender-at hand, as he well might have been, in Kensington Square on the eve of Queen Anne's last seizurenot to stain his family honor in the person of proud Beatrix, whilst he adjures him to remember how all their lives were being hazarded for his own:

"The night being warm, the windows were open both towards the Garden and the Square. Colonel Esmond heard through the closed door the voice of the watchman calling the hour in the Square on the other side. He opened the door communicating with the Prince's room. Martin, the servant that rode with Beatrix to Hounslow, was just going out of the chamber as Esmond entered it, and when the fellow was gone, and the watchman again sang his cry of 'Past ten o'clock and a starlight night,' Esmond again spoke to the Prince in a low voice, and said, 'Your Royal Highness hears that man?' 'Après vous, monsieur,' says the Prince. 'I have but to beckon him from the window, and send him fifty yards, and he returns with a guard of men, and I deliver up to him the body of the person calling himself James III., for whose capture Parliament hath offered a reward of £500, as your Highness saw on our ride from Rochester." "

How the particularity of fact gives width to the scene! How the libretto of the watchman's warning under the summer stars bodes the climax of the movement! How these echoes vibrate and linger! This is real history, even if it never happened, history steeping character, character informing history, things as they are, and all enveloped in the thrill of the season and the hush of the moment.

Not less compelling, with its ironies of interlude, is his crystallization of Waterloo. The tiny touch of the overture, when Jos performs the one unselfish action of his life in begging

Amelia to share his dinner, is worthy of a master. And the simplicity of the dénouement has seldom been surpassed; it illustrates Thackeray's feeling that the heart-beats of suspense are quite as historical as the details of campaign. We seem to be there:

moans

All

It grew to be broad daylight as they stood here, and fresh news began to arrive from the war brought by men who had been actors in the scene. Wagons and long country carts laden with wounded came rolling into the town, ghastly groans came from within them, and haggard faces looked up sadly from out of the straw. Jos Sedley was looking at one of these carriages with a painful curiosity. The of the people within were frightful-the wearied horses could hardly pull the cart. "Stop! stop!" a feeble voice cried from the straw, and the carriage stood opposite Mr. Sedley's hotel. "It is George! I know it is!" cried Amelia, rushing in a moment to the balcony with a pallid face and loose, flowing hair. It was not George, however, but it was the next best thing: it was news of him. It was poor Tom Stubble. day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away, the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and repelling the furious charges of the French horsemen. Guns, which were heard at Brussels, were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades falling, and the resolute survivors falling in. Towards evening the attack of the French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened in its fury. They. . . were preparing for a final onset. It came at last: the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the Hill of St. Jean at length, and once to sweep the English from the height which they had maintained all day, and spite of all: unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled death from the English line the dark, rolling column pressed on and up the hill. It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began to wave and falter. Then it stopped, still facing the shot. Then at last the English troops rushed from the post from