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another woman as Amelia has not been drawn since Margaret in Faust.

Of his other great works, Pendennis is the richest in character and incident, and the least pleasing; the Newcomes the most humane, but less vigorous and concentrated than any of the others; Esmond--the later parts at least-by far the best and noblest. We have no temptation to discuss the merits of its imitative style and scenery, observing only that though a modern mind shines through the external coat, yet probably no other man could have gathered so many minute and characteristic indicia of the times of which he writes, and so artfully have blended them together. It is as a tale we look at it; and though to most men such a subject, so treated, would have afforded more than ordinary temptations to an overloading of character with costume and external detail, with Mr. Thackeray the reverse is the case. He is freed from his devotion to the petty satire of modern conventions, and has fewer calls for the exercise of small contempts. The main characters, Esmond, his mistress, and Beatrix, are the ablest he has drawn; they are not less vivid than his others, and more complete. Esmond is strong, vigorous, noble, finely executed as well as conceived, and his weakness springs from the strength of a generous and impulsive nature. He is no exception to the observation that Mr. Thackeray never endows a hero with principles of action. Esmond is true to persons, not to ideas of right or duty. His virtue is fidelity, not conscientiousness. Beatrix is perhaps the finest picture of splendid, lustrous, physical beauty ever given to the world. It shines down every woman that poet or painter ever drew. Helen of Greece,

"Fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,”

is the only one who approaches her. And both her character and that of her mother are master-pieces of poetical insight; the latter blemished, however, here and there with the author's unconquerable hankering to lay his finger on a blot. He must search it out, and give it at least its due blackness. He will not leave you to gather that it must be there,-he parades it to the day, and presses it to your reluctant eyes. It comes partly from the truthfulness of his nature, which cannot bear that a weakness should be concealed, and partly probably from a mistaken apprehension of the truth that the artist must be true to nature. There was a time when a good deal of parade was made and some very diluted philosophy spun out of the distinction between "the true" and "the real." But this simple fact there is, that a man may be true to nature and yet depart from all her mani

fested forms; and that it is a higher striving to be faithful to such an inborn conception than to mutilate and distort it for the sake of finding room in it for certain observed facts. Mr. Thackeray sometimes does this, oftener he does what is quite as unpleasing. When in a character, especially a woman's, he comes upon a defect, he does not allow it to speak itself, or show itself naturally, and sink with its own proper significance into the reader's mind. He rushes in as author, seizes on it, and holds it up with sadness or triumph: "See," he says, "this is what you find in the best women." Thus he gives it an undue importance and vividness, and troubles and distorts the true impression of the whole character.

In the same spirit he lays hold of the petty dishonesties and shams of social life. Almost all these have their origin in vanity, and in its hasty and habitual gratification the meanness of the devices is overlooked, at any rate not often wilfully adopted with a consciousness of its presence. Such contrivances are follies of a bad kind; but to stigmatise them as deliberate hypocrisies is to give a very false significance to the worst ingredient in them.

In the Newcomes "the elements are kindlier mixed" than in any of the other fictions; there is a great softening of tone, a larger predominance is given to feeling over sarcasm. As before, the book is a transcript from life; but the life is more pleasantly selected, and the baser ingredients not scattered with so lavish a hand. If the execution be somewhat inferior, as perhaps it is, the characters of Clive and Ethel less clearly and vividly defined than we have by long use to high excellence begun to think we have a right to expect they should be, and the former unattractive in his feebleness, if the journey through the story be rather langweilig, sometimes from over-detail, sometimes from long and superficial moralisings over the sins of society,-yet there is much to reconcile us to these shortcomings in exchange, in some greater respite from the accustomed sneer. We have said before that the genius of Thackeray has many analogies to that of Goethe. He is like him, not only in his mode of depicting characters as they live, instead of reproducing their depths and entirety from the conception of a penetrative imagination, but also in his patient and tolerant acceptance of all existing phenomena, and his shrinking not merely from moral judgment but from moral estimate. The avoidance of the former, springs in Thackeray from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men's real motives of action; the latter, a very different thing, springs from this same wide insight,

which makes the task more than ordinarily difficult, especially to an intellect not framed to take pleasure in general conclusions, and from his imagination being one which does not naturally conceive in separate wholes, and most of all from an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on us all to form determinate estimates of the characters and moral incidents around us, if only to form the landmarks and bearings for our own conduct in life. These features remain in the Newcomes. There is the same want of ballasting thought, the same see-saw between cynicism and sentiment, the same suspension of moral judgment. The indignant impulse prompts the lash, and the hand at once delivers it; while the mind hangs back, doubts its justice, and sums up after execution with an appeal to our charity on the score of the undecipherable motives of human action, the heart's universal power of self-deception, and the urgency of fate and circumstance.

ART. VIII.-FOREIGN POLICY AND THE NEXT
CAMPAIGN.

General Treaty of Congress, signed at Vienna, June 9, 1815; with the three Annexes thereto, relating to the Kingdom of Poland and the Republic of Cracon. Presented to the House of Commons by her Majesty's command, in pursuance of their Address of the 8th February 1847.

Correspondence between_Viscount Castlereagh (late Marquis of Londonderry) and the Emperor Alexander of Russia, respecting the Kingdom of Poland. Vienna, October, November, 1814. Presented to the House of Commons, February 1847.

Papers relative to the Suppression, by the Governments of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, of the free State of Cracow, and to the Annexation of that State to the Austrian Empire. Presented to both Houses of Parliament, February 1847.

Correspondence respecting the Relations between Greece and Turkey. Presented to both Houses of Parliament, 1854.

Eastern Papers. Part XIV. Negociation at Vienna. Presented to both Houses of Parliament, 1855.

Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts seit den Wiener Verträgen. Von G. G. Gervinus. Erster Band. Leipzig, 1855.

The Polish Question, from the German Point of View. By a German Statesman. Translated from the German. London, Ridgway.

1855.

THE "happy new year" prayed for to-day by millions of affectionate voices,-may God copiously send it into private homes, where so much remains sheltered from the world's storms!

In

public affairs it is more than can be expected; and to exchange such a wish in the family of States would imply a levity and delusion secure of disappointment. At the opening of 1856 Europe knows that the holiday-mood must be short, and the welcome to the fresh time graver than its wont. Stern duties await it; sharp sufferings impend over the months; unforeseen complications cannot fail to arise; and never was there a time when clear commanding purpose was more needful in our statesmen,-purpose flexible enough to take up the exigencies of the hour, but unbending in its general direction. Dearth of the chief necessaries of life, a falling scale of wages, a rising rate of discount, the European spread of speculative finance, the need of loans by every body at once, growls from Washington, insolence from Naples, snares from Vienna, plots at Athens, the permanent ban of the Pope on one ally, and the periodic shots of assassins at another, are omens serious enough to make wise men anxious, and to fill the irresolute with dismay. None of these things move us, however, in comparison with one all-pervading doubt, which adds a darkness to them all have we public men to lead us with honour through?-men who see their way, and mean to hold to it; who, having shaped the nation's best instincts into well-defined conviction, will prevent popular fickleness by constancy in themselves; men in whose hands the character of England and the menaced interests of Europe are really safe? This miserable doubt has settled with a fixed depression on the spirit of the country. Banished for a moment by happy words at Romsey, it is brought back by sinister overtures to Knowsley; forgotten in the excitement of the morning's telegraph, it returns at night with some four-point" rumour from Vienna or Berlin. Nor does this painful feeling merely express a personal estimate of this or that cabinet-minister or political leader; though it would find perhaps excuse enough in the shifting parts of last year's drama at St. Stephen's. The distrust is chronic, and has a deeper seat. It is impossible to follow men who cease to lead, and put faith in those who have no faith themselves; and it has become the habit and accomplishment of public men to substitute the feeling of the country for their own; to dispense with positive convictions, and calculate instead the pressures of the hour; to determine the right by merely assuming the inevitable. It was the fatal merit of Sir Robert Peel to leave this type of political morality as a heritage to his successors. Thrice compelled to surrender to the force of national opinion, and frankly accepting it as a decree of nature, he acquired a matchless tact in yielding; he consecrated the virtue of legislative acquiescence; he identified statesmanship with the art of discriminating between ripe and unripe social wants. The

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admiration felt for his later career has raised this narrow and imperfect conception into the Englishman's very ideal of political wisdom; giving it a prominence far greater, it is probable, than it had in his own mind. No doubt it is of the utmost moment to read aright the indications of matured opinion, to avoid protracted resistance to an irreversible national will, and pronounce the verdict when the hearing has fairly closed. The institutions of a country are thus kept in permanent harmony with its life, and escape the danger incurred either by their own inertia or by the pedantry of doctrinaire politicians. Yet, after all, this is but the negative side of government. We cannot consent to reduce it thus to a mere registering-machine for jotting down the wishes of the hour, and forming the diary of a people's humours. Let the popular sentiment act freely on the statesman; but if he does not powerfully react on the popular sentiment, and mould the very opinion which he obeys, he is unworthy to occupy his higher point of view:

"Celsa sedet olus arce

Sceptra tenens, mollitque animos, et temperat iras."

But, according to our modern doctrine, the political Æolus is but paid clerk to the national anemometer; his cave of the winds, a snug office in Downing Street; and his business, to supply paper for the wriggling lines of the outside breeze, and keep the pencils pointed that are broken by jerks of storm. The opinions prevalent in a free country are surely not to be treated as a destiny, on which the minister has but to wait; they are, to an extent little suspected, an undetermined power that waits for him. True, a host of other causes is ever impressing a certain direction on the mind of a people; but among them all there is no influence more steadily intense than the earnest expression, by trusted leaders, of a clear political creed and noble public aims. To abdicate this function, to leave it in the state to which the last five-and-twenty years have reduced it, amounts to a confession of unfaithfulness or incapacity. A few weeks ago a candidate for the suffrages of an Irish constituency, in responding to public curiosity as to his political principles, replied, "Just what you please, gentlemen."* Perhaps he intended to parody the pliant policy which he emulated only too well.

If in relation to home questions there is some plea for the helpless sequaciousness of our statesmen, they cannot be excused

* "You will naturally feel anxious to know what particular line of politics I shall advocate, in the event of your choosing me for your representative. My answer is plain,- Whatever you please. Although a Catholic in religion, yet I am not bound by the Church; and you have only to direct me how I will [sic] act, and I shall endeavour to advocate your interests."—Address of Mr. C. Fitzgerald Higgins to the Constituency of Armagh.

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