that reverence for womanhood and youth, which satirists have not often maintained ;but just as there are many things in life which it is best not to know, so in these pictures of tainted humanity there is much to startle the faith, and to disquiet the fancy, without being atoned for by any commensurate advantage. With what admirable force, for example, are all the characters etched in Yellowplush's "Amours of Mr. Deuceace!" The Hon. Algernon Percy Deuceace himself, his amiable father, the Earl of Crabs,-Mr. Blewitt, where in literature shall we find such a trio of scoundrels, so distinct in their outlines, so unmistakably true in all their tints? How perfect, too, as portraits, are Dawkins, the pigeon, of whom Deuceace and Blewitt, well-trained hawks, make so summary a meal, and Lady Griffin, the young widow of Sir George Griffin, K.C.B., and her ugly step-daughter, Matilda! No one can question the probability of all the incidents of the story. Such things are happening every day. Young fools like Dawkins fall among thieves like Deuceace and Blewitt, and the same game of matrimonial speculation is being played daily, which is played with such notable results by Deuceace and Miss Matilda Griffin. The accomplished swindler is ever and anon caught like him, the fond silly woman as constantly awakened, like her, out of an insane dream, to find herself the slave of cowardice and brutality. Villany so cold, so polished, so armed at all points, as that of the Earl of Crabs, is more rare, but men learn by bitter experience, that there are in society rascals equally agreeable and equally unredeemed. There is no vulgar daubing in the portraiture of all these worthies ;-the lines are all true as life itself, and bitten into the page as it were with vintol. Every touch bears the traces of a master's hand, and yet what man ever cared to return to the book, what woman ever got through it without a sensation of humiliation and disgust? Both would wish to believe the writer untrue to nature, if they could; both would willingly forego the exhibition of what, under the aspect in which it is here shown, is truly "that hideous sight, a naked human heart." I sion of this story years ago impressed us. Deuceace, expecting an immense fortune with Miss Matilda Griffin, who, on her part, believes him to be in possession of a fine income, marries her; the marriage having been managed by his father, the Earl of Crabs, in order that he may secure Lady Griffin for himself, with all Miss Griffin's fortune, which falls to her ladyship, in the event of Matilda marrying without her consent. Lady Griffin has previously revenged herself for the Honorable Algernon's slight of her own attachment to him, by involving him in a duel with a Frenchman, in which he loses his right hand. The marriage once concluded, Deuceace and his wife find their mutual mistake, and the penniless 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:— Of all Mr. Thackeray's books, this is, perhaps, the most open to the charge of sneering cynicism, and yet, even here, glimpses of that stern but deep pathos are to be found, of which Mr. Thackeray has since proved himself so great a master. We can even now remember the mingled sensation of shuddering pity and horror, with which the conclu 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 carriage 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. 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. "No sooner were my lord and lady seated, than "Deuceace turned round. I see his face now -the face of a devvle of hell! Fust, he lookt 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 inter There is a frightful truthfulness in this pic-est, the tale might have won for its author ture that makes the heart sick. We turn from it, as we do from the hideous realities of an old Flemish painter, or from some dismal revelation in a police report. Still, the author's power burns into the memory the image of that miserable woman, and his simple exclamation at the close tells of a heart that has bled at the monstrous brutalities to the sex, of which the secret records are awfully prolific, but which the romance writer rarely ventures to approach. If we have smiled at the miserable vanity and weakness of poor Matilda Griffin before, we remember them no more after that woeful scene. "The Luck of Barry Lyndon," which followed soon after the appearance of "The Yellowplush Papers," was a little relieved by brighter aspects of humanity, but so little, that it can never be referred to with pleasure, despite the sparkling brilliancy of the narrative, and abundant traces of the most delightful humor. How completely, in a sentence, does Barry convey to us a picture of his mother! "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." much of the popularity which he must have seen, with no small chagrin, carried off by men altogether unfit to cope with him in originality or power. There is always apparent in Mr. Thackeray's works, so much natural kindliness, so true a sympathy with goodness, that only some bitter and unfortunate experiences can explain, as it seems to us, the tendency of his mind at this period to present human nature in its least ennobling aspects. Whenever the man himself speaks out in the first person, as in his pleasant books of travel,-his "Irish Sketch Book," and his "Journey from Cornhill to Cairo," he shows so little of the cynic, or the melancholy Jaques - finds so hearty a delight in the contemplation of all all social worth and all elevation of character, simple pleasures, and so cordially recognizes 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 miration for the power which, by depicting no want of love for his fellow-men, or of adgoodness, 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 excellences the absence of which in his own writings is their greatest drawback. It is thus he wrote in February, 1844, of Dickens's "Christmas Carol." We quote from "Fraser's Magazine." 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. Thackery 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 "And now there is but one book left in the box, no scruples of consience or misgivings of the the smallest one, but oh! how much the best of moral sense, a conception as daring as the all. It is the work of the master of all the Engexecution is admirable. For a time the read-lish humorists now alive; the young man who er is carried along, with a smiling admiration whole tribe, and who has kept it. came and took his place calmly at the head of the Think of all of the author's humor, and quiet way of we owe Mr. Dickens since those half dozen years, bringing into view the seamy side of a num- the store of happy hours that he has made us pass, ber of respectable shams; but when he finds the kindly and pleasant companions whom he has that he is passed along from rake to swind- introduced to us; the harmless laughter, the geneler, from gambler to ruffian,-that the men rous wit, the frank, manly, human love which he lie, cheat, and cog the dice, and that the has taught us to feel! Every month of those women intrigue, or drink brandy in their tea, years has brought us some kind token from this delightful genius. His books may have lost in or are fatuous fools, the atmosphere becomes art, perhaps, but could we afford to wait? Since oppressive, and even the brilliancy of the the days when the Spectator was produced by a wit begins to pall. Yet there are passages man of kindred mind and temper, what books in this story, and sketches of character, have appeared that have taken so affectionate a 'God bless him!' fit, 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!" 6 hold of the English public as these? They have gance; there is no mistake about Thackemade millions of rich and poor happy; they ray's being from the life. Dickens's sentimight have been locked up for nine years, doubt-ment, which, when good, is good in the first less, and pruned here and there, and improved class, is frequently far-fetched and pitched (which I doubt), but where would have been the reader's benefit all this time, while the author was in an unnatural key-his pathos elaborated elaborating his performance? Would the com- by the artifices of the practised writer. munion between the writer and the public have Thackeray's sentiment, rarely indulged, is been what it is now,-something continual, con- never otherwise than genuine; his pathos is fidential, something like personal affection? unforced, and goes to the roots of the heart. "Who can listen to objections regarding such The style of Dickens, originally lucid, and a book as this? It seems to me a national bene- 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 idea in the very fittest garb. Dickens's 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. The mirth which Thackeray moves rarely passes beyond a smile, and his pathos, while it leaves the eye unmoistened, too often makes the heart sad to the core, and leaves it so. Both are satirists of the vices of the social system; but the one would rally us into amendment, the other takes us straight up to the flaw, and compels us to admit it. Our fancy merely is amused by Dickens, and this often when he means to satirize some grave vice of character or the defects of a tyrannous system. It is never so with Thackeray: he forces the mind to acknowledge the truth of his picture, and to take the lesson home. Dickens seeks to amend the heart by depicting virtue; Thackeray seeks to achieve the same end by exposing vice. Both are great moralists; but it is absurd to class them as belonging to one 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 Archi In a writer who felt and wrote thus, it was most strange to find no effort made to link 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. The salutary influence of Dickens's 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. The genius of the men is, however, as diverse as can well be conceived. 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 makes 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. Dickens's serious characters, for the most part, relish of melo-dramatic extrava P.R eray's fictions has no doubt arisen in a great bald apparently knows something, but he possible contr 5630 w show in their... c 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, The unpretending character of Mr. Thack-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 Shirelane; 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. Nor was it only in the literature of Newgate, as it was well named, that he found matter for reproof and reformation. He had looked too earnestly and closely at life, and its issues, not to see that the old and easy manner of the novelist in distributing what is called poetical justice, and lodging his favorites in a haven of common-place comfort at the close of some improbable game of cross-purposes, had little in common with the actual course of things in the world, and could convey little either to instruct the understanding, to school the affections, or to strengthen the will. At the close of his "Barry Lyndon," we find his views on this matter expressed in the following words:"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 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, was the higher task to which Mr. Thackeray now addressed himself. He could not carry out this purpose without disappointing those who think a novel flat which does not centre its interest on a handsome and faultless hero, with a comfortable balance at his banker's, or a heroine of good family and high imaginative qualities. Life does not abound in such. Its greatest virtues are most frequently hid in the humblest and least attractive shapes; its greatest vices most commonly veiled under a fascinating exterior, and a carriage of unquestionable respectability. It would have cost a writer of Mr. Thackeray's practised skill little effort to have thrown into his picture figures which would have satisfied the demands of those who insist upon delineations 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. 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 sunshine on his picture, and by lightening the shadows in some of his characters. Without any compromise of truth, he might have given us somebody to admire and esteem, without qualifications or humiliating reserves. That 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 reminding us of such facts? There is a wantonness in fixing the eye upon some merely casual flaw, after you have filled the heart and imagination with a beau |