which no enemy had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled. No more firing was heard at Brussels-the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead with a bullet through his heart.

One wishes that Nelson had been a figure in his fables.

What a scene-painter he is, how dramatic, yet how untheatrical! What a charming picture is that of the actresses dropping their curtseys to Dr. Johnson! Then, again, how he travels beyond the hour in countless allusions. His Four Georges abounds in these. And, once more, with what precision he can sum up a century in a sentence. When he stamps Beau Nash's portrait as Folly, "but Folly at full length between the busts of Newton and Pope," "I should like to have seen the Folly," he continues; "it was a splendid, embroidered, beruffled, snuff-boxed, redheeled, impertinent Folly, and knew how to make itself respected." Those last words of this familiar masterpiece give the whole of the Georgian era, and are worth pages of "impartial" still life. Hallam always seems to me such an "impartial" historian. His facts might as well be a row of chairs to dust, or doze on. Impartial! How can one be partial to a chair unless association comes to the rescue. About what was, doctors will always differ, but what might have been-is history's parley with romance, and here the artist convinces.

Thackeray was not always partial. I doubt if a saner or sounder analysis exists of the outbreak of the American war than that which concludes the long labyrinth of his Virginians. "I was on the loyal side," perpends Sir George Warrington, "yet wanted the Whigs to win." You have the dual bent of Thackeray-the Steele in him and Addison to perfection, and you get a true

presentment of the attitude of the American gentry. He rightly shows that the true cause of severance was not the Boston riot over a tea-duty which was ninepence less than in England, but the resentment of a grown-up nation at absurd tutelage. The initial pretexts were otherwise. As he puts it, regarding the rioters, "The wrath of our white father was kindled against those Mohocks in masquerade." He exposes "these loud politicians, these lawyers with their perpetual noise about Greece and Rome." And here he is on the side of dogged Sam Johnson, whose limitations he comprehended together with his central nobility, just as in the few peeps afforded he takes in all the morbid niminy-piminy of the fat, little Sam Richardson dandling the passions with masterly gusto. All the earlier episodes of the American rebellion he tracks with Richardsonian minuteness, following every point of the map, the road, and the by-play, dwelling on the personnel, the perspective, and even the uniforms with that loving knowledge which he always displayed in things naval and military-a knowledge rare in civilians. He had the patriot's instinct. But even in this most sustained of his efforts, where events and characters are reinote enough for calmness, the political prejudice sometimes emerges. He does Washington-Addison in actionmore than justice. He trembles to think of the barbarities possible if Britain had won, but he passes over Washington's own severities after his triumph. While none more admired the life and scope of a country gentleman, he is far readier to praise it in Virginia than at home. There is a long passage about Court and country in his vignette of George the First which bears this out. He constantly fails to see that even the Squire Westerns performed some of their local duties. He is prone to assure us that all

now spirit. And yet when the Steele in him gets the upper hand, how he revels in the jocund side of a merrier England. He is juster to the squires here:-"A hundred and twenty years ago," he muses, "there were not only country towns in England, but people who inhabited them. We were very much more gregarious; we were amused by very simple pleasures; every town had its fair, every village its wake. The old poets have sung a hundred jolly ditties about great cudgel-playings, famous grinning through horse-collars, great maypole meetings, and morris-dances. The girls used to run races clad in very light attire; and the kind gentry and good parsons thought no shame in looking on." Such strains as these and there are not many are certainly on what Thackeray himself terms, "the side of the dons."

Thackeray, I have ventured to say, leaned towards republicanism. "It was the rule," he writes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "to be dazzled by Princes, and people's eyes winked quite honestly at the royal radiance." Nay, addressing the high bourgeoisie of the fifties, he exclaims, "Gessner's cap is still up in the market-place of Europe, and not a few folks are still kneeling to it." Queen Anne's weak heart, too, "hankered after her relatives at St. Germain's." And in tracing the pedigree of the good Queen Victoria, to whom he paid so devoted a tribute, he cannot resist a sly suggestion of the dancing lady, Eleanor Dolbreuse. Here, as before, the twin strains of royalist and republican are palpable, for none more than he delighted in the pageantry and festivals of Courts; he staged them to ad

miration. "A jolly set must they have been," he writes of George the Second's bored attendants, "those maids of honor." He relished a spice of naughtiness even when he preached against it, and scandal becomes human when guffawed over by friendly topers; indeed, it is the friendship of genius in the Augustan age that. most attracts him. He is good, but no goody-goody, perhaps even over-indulgent to the flowing bowl. While the gentle lode-stars of home and woman steer his course and form his highest heaven (there is a touching passage on woman's influence in his Virginians), he shows a sneaking sympathy with not a few of the runagates. His historical portraits of dubious clergymen are to the life, and some of them corroborate Congreve, who makes "Sir Wilful" hiccough out, "Orthodoxy's a hard word-Greek for claret." In this Puritan-Cavalier connection one more episode may be quoted, this time from the English Humorists:

While Mr. Addison was abroad, and after he came home in rather a dismal way to wait upon Providence in his shabby lodging in the Haymarket, young Captain Steele was cutting a much smarter figure than that of his classical friend of Charterhouse Cloister and Maudlin Walk. Could not some painter give an interview between the gallant Captain of Lucas's with his hat cocked, and his lace, and his face, too, a little tarnished with drink, and that poet, that philosopher, pale, proud, and poor, his friend and monitor of school days, of all days? How Dick must have bragged about his chances and his hopes, and the fine company he kept, and the charms of the reigning toasts and popular actresses, and the number of bottles that he and my lord and some other pretty fellows had cracked overnight at the "Devil" and the "Garter." Cannot one fancy Joseph Addison's calm smile and cold, gray eyes following Dick for an instant as he struts down the Mall to dine with the Guard at St. James's; before he turns with sober pace and

threadbare suit, to walk back to his lodgings up the two pairs of stairs?

He

That is Addison, that is Steele, but Thackeray has over-pictured the paragon, well-named Joseph, who, in truth, was no "poet," but exploited, annexed, and refined the intuition of that careless genius whom he deigned to patronize. The original idea of the Spectator's characters was all Steele's: his were the sparks and Addison's were the bellows; the Spectator itself followed the lines of Steele's Tatler. Addison's condescension irritates. was one who, in Swift's lines on the Day of Judgment, "never erred, through pride." Angelic when not thwarted, amicably inaccessible, he was proud as Lucifer, and a snob worthy of enrolment in Thackeray's own snobography. Of Swift, too, Thackeray formed an imperfect estimate, though he discerned the stars behind that lurid night, and the something sweet and tender that underlay that bitter fountain. He failed to mark that Swift's life was one long progress of incipient madness, that a physical basis was probably the root of his saturnine satire, that his vitriol was despair, that prudence as well as insolence prompted his diatribes against wives and children. Yet he was not the nursery ogre that Thackeray imagines. The scene where he plays with Abigail Masham's child is left out of sight though it figures in the Journal to Stella, while the novelist dwells on the characteristic bullying of the poor printer.

Perhaps the truest and tenderest of Thackeray's humorist-portraits is the one devoted to Pope. Swift (like Byron) was a warped man of action who found a fighting vent in letters. Pope was a poet, and poets Thackeray could understand. How just is his praise of the club of friendship, his outlook on Pope's correspondence, his emphasis

of courage and filial devotion in that crooked body and half-crooked soul, his response to all the tremors of that tense, palpitating spirit! How striking his famous passage on the Dunciad: "I think of the works of young Pope," it ends, "as I do of the actions of young Bonaparte or young Nelson. In their common life you will find frailties and meannesses. . . But in the presence of the great occasion, the great soul flashes out and conquers transcendently. In thinking of the splendor of Popes' young victories. . . . I hail and salute the achieving genius, and do homage to the pen of a hero." Here we gain, not only an inner glimpse, but the supreme of Thackeray's style which is assonant, and beats time to its subject. It is steeped in the best of the eighteenth century, every phase of which he rendered in its own language-a manner that lends a twofold life to his history, though perhaps there are fewer "quotations" in Thackeray than in any great imaginative stylist. Here, as so often, he reproduces the sensitive flexibility of Sterne, and in this connection I should like to have said a word on Thackeray's Yorick-a theme perhaps hardly "historical." How can Thackeray regard Sterne as a great jester rather than a great humorist, when he himself emphasizes his power to draw tears? That Sterne shed them in waterfalls may have been a knack, and the way in which he shed them was certainly morbid. But that he drew them goes deeper down-down into Thackeray's own domain. Is the soft flutist to be excluded from the undying orchestra? Thackeray knew better than this, he was himself a flutist. And, to conclude the Humorists, why did he omit Sheridan, who could play on so many instruments? Perhaps Thackeray prefers the soloists in the concert. As historian Thackeray plays a solo.

The fuller chords of

unison rarely enter into his performance. He meets and thrills his audience by the perfection of a single and The Fortnightly Review.

simple scale. "There is much music, excellent voice in this little organ." Walter Sichel.

I.

No man they say can be a hero to his valet, but to a fag his master is always a hero, and remains so to the end of time. To him it is an amazement that all the world does not see his master in the same light as he does the light that blots out the ugly face and sharpens the edge of the halo. In this light Boswell saw Johnson, and with the genius of a literary artist modelled himself a pigmy, mean and gluttonous, that the stodgy ill-mannered pedant for whom he fagged might appear to the world a colossal statue of learning, clothed in the ermine of wisdom, to deliver the judgments of wit. You remember how Boswell could rehearse every footstep of the dramatic entrance that Johnson made into his life The scene was the back parlor of Mr. Davies, the bookseller, in his shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden. The "aweful approach"-be careful with the "e," my good compositor, or it would look awful-the "aweful approach" of the great man was perceived through the glass door separating the shop from the back parlor. What lover could remember with so much adoration of detail the first meeting with the dearly beloved? But when there sails into your ken the master mind that is to dominate the length of your little life, when you see face to face for the first time the actor who is to play Hamlet to your Horatio, the picture is snapped on to the film of your memory and remains to the last. And when works and days are over, and you seek in the twilight of life to fill up a few weary hours by unrolling

from the spools of memory rare pictures of forgotten days, you find that the negative with the clearest outline is the portrait of the man you took to be a king.

Dear old Cecil! How well I remember my first meeting with him. It was on a summer afternoon, and I was standing at an open garden gate in a beautiful Surrey valley. Down the valley, away towards a village and a railway station, stretched a long white road. I had just been introduced to a clever man of commanding stature, with a trade smile that could only deceive a parent. He was the proprietor of the preparatory school at which I had arrived. The interview had taken place in his study. There was a false sense of comfort and security about that study. The dread of it had entered my ten-year-old soul as of a place where operations were performed without the aid of chloroform. And now I stood at the open gate lacking the pluck of a rat or a weasel to make a bolt for freedom, and I watched the village fly jog slowly away along the white road, carrying with it my home and all I loved in the shape of my mother. The sun shone full and bright, but it was cold inside me. The sky was black, absolutely dull crape black. I have never seen it that color since, not even in Manchester. One tear I kept swallowing over and over again at the back of my throat, the other escaped and ran down the bridge of my nose. Wireless telegraphy was not imagined in those days, but I experienced it, and caught the message that in the village fly, now a mere

has sent me to take you round. You are to be in my dormitory and you shall fag for me, do you hear? Have you brought a hamper?"

I had brought a hamper, but to dear old Cecil's disgust I had allowed it to be taken off the fly with my other luggage, and doubtless it was already in the hands of the matron-or "the Enemy" as dear old Cecil always called her. He took me through the schoolrooms and into the house and up to the dormitory. I can see him now, a big fat slouching lad of fourteen, with thick lips, a heavy smile, and curly ruddy hair. He could not have ruled that little kingdom as he did by mere physical strength, for there were several fellows of less than his own weight who could have pummelled him into a jelly. It was not any strength of moral purpose that made us recognize him as our king, for I must own with regret that many of his actions both at school and in after-life could not be made to square with any elementary code of virtue and honor. No, the fact is that dear old Cecil was born for kingship. He was born to rule and to be obeyed, and, as modern writers have so satisfactorily proved, when a man of his stamp rises one must not expect him to be bound by the ten or any further or better commandments whatsoever.

I cannot honestly say that dear old Cecil ever drew inspiration for his masterpieces of constructive or destructive

statesmanship from any by-laws of morality known to modern civilization. He saw instinctively that what was good for him was good for the world that surrounded him. It was his power of impressing this on smaller minds and making them react to the suggestion that made him a natural ruler of mankind.

He was, like all great and powerful men, a good listener. He listened with an earnest gaze and a watery mouth to a full and detailed list of the contents of my hamper. Three items he singled out from the rest as necessary to be rescued from "the Enemy"namely, a pork pie, a large packet of acid drops-his favorite sweet-and a bottle of raspberry vinegar, which, mingled with a seidlitz powder, made a refreshing summer drink. These he said I must obtain for him.

It was a capital offence to interfere with the contents of a hamper without consent of the matron; but as I did not know the rules at present Cecil decided that the thing might safely be done and it was done. That night by the light of the summer moon I supped with dear old Cecil for the first time, together with several others of his worshippers. Dear old Cecil cut the pork pie in two with his own pocket-knife, and royally divided the small half among his courtiers, keeping the larger one for himself. In the same way he drank the lion's share of the raspberry vinegar and annexed the bulk of the acid drops. As he said in kindly banter, "I'm not going to have you fellows sick in the night and giving the show away."

I do not think one of us remembered those words to his disadvantage when the bell rang in the early morning, and we found him deathly white and groaning with pain and calling out for the matron.

"The Enemy" came into the camp with castor oil and a smile of triumph,