lowers? If falsehood about the holiest things is so blessed with fruit that is not false, then surely there is no such divine rule of truth and justice over the world as we had supposed; and grapes may blossom upon the thorns, and figs be sought among the thistles. God blesses alike the truth and the lie. And the record of eighteen centuries of Church history is the account of the exuberant vitality of a pious fraud at best, and at worst of simple fraud and falsehood. From the edge of this precipice even the non-Christian would try to struggle backwards. This moral earthquake, where an underlying falsehood shakes all the firm ground of truth, which we thought solid to the axis, we can only think of with horror. But now the wonders of Nazareth are complete. This little town gave birth to a poor carpenter, who, with nothing to redeem him from the usual conditions of poverty in an obscure town, came forth as a teacher of men, and offered them deliverance from sin, and reconcilement with an offended God, in the name of that Father whose Son he claimed to be. His whole message is admitted to be original, powerful, elevating to the soul. His character was unique in its purity and in its strength. The priests and rulers were able to kill him, but they were not able to prevent the spreading of his doctrine; and multitudes embraced it, Jews and Greeks, upon the strange condition of belief in Jesus and his resurrection. God indeed has blessed this doctrine with marvellous success, and to this hour it is a powerful agent in the world, the cement of society, the comfort of mourners, the tamer of unruly wills and affections, the bringer of peace. Of the miracles that enforced the doctrine, we have as yet said nothing. In fact, a supposed antecedent impossibility of miracles leads some to a view of this history which is itself impossible. That this young unlettered man imagined, with no supernatural aid, a system which stands quite alone; that this youth, born in corrupt and evil times, in a town noted for worthlessness even in those times, of a people whose hopes were debased, whose apostasy from God was almost complete, whose literature was Talmuds and rabbinical trifling, stepped forth complete in all that makes a wise mind and a powerful will, and a fine and tender heart, with no savour whatever of the bad soil from whence he sprung; that God blessed his teaching with unparalleled success; and yet that all the most characteristic features of his teaching and life were either imposture and delusion, is a great marvel. Why should we dogmatize against physical miracles, and be so easy of belief as to moral miracles? The physical marvel, forsooth, is a mere rupture of the chain of causation: is not the moral miracle the same? Is it more surprising that Jesus called back Renan-Vie de Jésus. 209 life to the widow's son, and changed the morbid pallor of the dead face into the rosy hues of life, than that he himself rose out of the pale corpse of Judaism in the young bloom of spiritual health and strength, and with a voice as from the dead proclaimed the meaning of law and prophets, and promised to fulfil them? Is it in the course of natural causation that, when Judaism was most corrupt, a character more perfect than that of all her prophets should illustrate her decline, and spring from a race whose every act and feeling was in violent contrast to his own? Surely if we understood moral causes as well as we do physical, and even this would be but a little, we should see it as a marvel, as a divine intervention, that Nazareth unconsciously produced One who contained all that the world required from its Saviour, power and wisdom and love unspeakable. If Christ rose not from the dead, if he wrought no miracles, then our conception of Christianity must be one that shocks every moral feeling; false claims of power, pretended miracles, deceived apostles, deluded converts, and a creed that placed on God's right hand an equal Son, blessed by that God whose glory it invades with every token of favour. It cannot be. By bandying about the records of the life of Jesus, and pruning and adding, the character, we are told, was shaped by degrees into its present purity, the doctrine acquired its present proportions. But this process, if it took place at all, was the work of the lowest orders; for such were the first believers. But what parallel is there in history for such a process? What notions were there, either Jewish and Pagan, at that time, out of which such an ideal could have been formed? We shall be answered that it was the Christians, those whom Christ attracted and formed, who formed the conception of Christ himself such as we have it. This is indeed reasoning in a circle. It would have needed preternatural wisdom in the disciples to fashion the system of the Gospel, and a higher standard of holiness than we have any trace of elsewhere to conceive his holy character. Fatigued with these speculations which have no historic basis, which are really undertaken to get rid of miracles, of facts that rest on as good evidence as any historical fact whatever, we rest at last upon the oldest and best hypothesis, that this Jesus of the Gospels is represented as wise beyond man, as pure beyond angels, as resolute to the death, because such a man so lived, so taught, so acted, so loved; because he is verily the Son of God, the Conqueror of death, the glorified Redeemer! VOL. XL. NO. LXXIX. Ο ART. VIII.-Thackeray. THAT Mr. Thackeray was born in India in 1811; that he was educated at Charter House and Cambridge; that he left the University after a few terms' residence without a degree; that he devoted himself at first to art; that in pursuit thereof he lived much abroad "for study, for sport, for society;" that about the age of twenty-five, married, without fortune, without a profession, he began the career which has made him an English classic; that he pursued that career steadily till his death, all this has, within the last few weeks, been told again and again. It is a common saying that the lives of men of letters are uneventful. In an obvious sense this is true. They are seldom called on to take part in events which move the world, in politics, in the conflicts of nations; while the exciting incidents of sensation-novels are as rare in their lives as in the lives of other men. But men of letters are in no way exempt from the changes and chances of fortune; and the story of these, and of the effects which came from them, must possess an interest for all. Prosperity succeeded by cruel reverses; happiness, and the long prospect of it, suddenly clouded; a hard fight, with aims as yet uncertain, and powers unknown; success bravely won; the austerer victory of failure manfully borne ; these things make a life truly eventful, and make the story of that life full of interest and instruction. They will all fall to be narrated when Mr. Thackeray's life shall be written; we have only now to do with them so far as they illustrate his literary career, of which we propose to lay before our readers an account as complete as is in our power, and as impartial as our warm admiration for the great writer we have lost will allow. Many readers know Mr. Thackeray only as the Thackeray of Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The Virginians, the quadrilateral of his fame, as they were called by the writer of an able and kindly notice in the Illustrated News. The four volumes of Miscellanies published in 1857, though his reputation had been then established, are less known than they should be. But Mr. Thackeray wrote much which does not appear even in the Miscellanies; and some account of his early labours may not be unacceptable to our readers. His first attempt was ambitious. He became connected as editor, and also, we suspect, in some measure, as proprietor, with a weekly literary journal, the fortunes of which were not prosperous. We believe the journal to have been one which "The National Standard." 211 bore the imposing title of "The National Standard and Journal of Literature, Science, Music, Theatricals, and the Fine Arts." Thackeray's editorial reign began about the 19th Number, after which he seems to have done a good deal of work-reviews, letters, criticisms, and verses. As the National Standard is now hardly to be met with out of the British Museum, we give a few specimens of these first efforts. There is a mock sonnet by W. Wordsworth, illustrative of a drawing of Braham in stage nautical costume, standing by a theatrical sea-shore; in the background an Israelite, with the clothes'-bag and triple hat of his ancient race; and in the sky, constellation-wise, appears a Jew's harp, with a chaplet of bays round it. The sonnet runs : Say not that Judah's harp hath lost its tone, In music on a wondering world he burst, And charm'd the ravish'd ears of Sov'reign Anne.2 The sacred symbol-Jew's harp glorified Which, circled with a blooming wreath, is seen Of verdant bays; and thus are typified The pleasant music, and the baize of green, Whence issues out at eve Braham with front serene." We have here the germ of a style in which Thackeray became famous, though the humour of attributing this nonsense to Wordsworth, and of making Braham coeval with Queen Anne, is not now very plain. There is a yet more characteristic touch in a review of Montgomery's "Woman the Angel of Life," winding up with a quotation of some dozen lines, the order of which he says has been reversed by the printer, but as they read quite as well the one way as the other, he does not think it worth while to correct the mistake! A comical tale, called the "Devil's Wager," afterwards reprinted in the Paris Sketch-Book, also appeared in He 1 "It is needless to speak of the eminent vocalist and improvisatore. nightly delights a numerous and respectable audience at the Cider Cellar; and while on this subject I cannot refrain from mentioning the kindness of Mr. Evans, the worthy proprietor of that establishment. N.B.--A table d'hôte every Friday."-W. Wordsworth. 2 "Mr. Braham made his first appearance in England in the reign of Queen Anne.-W. W." the National Standard, with a capital woodcut, representing the devil as sailing through the air, dragging after him the fat Sir Roger de Rollo by means of his tail, which is wound round Sir Roger's neck. The idea of this tale is characteristic. The venerable knight already in the other world, has made a foolish bet with the devil involving very seriously his future prospects there, which he can only win by persuading some of his relatives on earth to say an Ave for him. He fails to obtain this slight boon from a kinsman successor for obvious reasons; and from a beloved niece, owing to a musical lover whose serenading quite puts a stop to her devotional exercises; and succeeds at last, only when, giving up all hope from compassion or generosity, he appeals by a pious fraud to the selfishness of a brother and a monk. The story ends with a very Thackerean touch:-" The moral of this story will be given in several successive numbers;" the last three words are in the Sketch-Book changed into "the second edition." Perhaps best of all is a portrait of Louis Philippe, presenting the Citizen King under the Robert Macaire aspect, the adoption and popularity of which Thackeray so carefully explains and illustrates in his Essay on "Caricatures and Lithography in Paris." Below the portrait are these lines, not themselves very remarkable, but in which, especially in the allusion to Snobs by the destined enemy of the race, we catch glimpses of the future: "Like the king in the parlour' he's fumbling his money, Little more than a snob. That's an end of the story." The journal seems to have been an attempt to substitute vigorous and honest criticism of books and of art for the partiality and slipslop general then, and now not perhaps quite unknown. It failed, however, partly, it may be, from the inexperience of its managers, but doubtless still more from the want of the capital necessary to establish anything of the sort in the face of similar journals of old standing. People get into a habit of taking certain periodicals unconsciously, as they take snuff. The National Standard, etc. etc., came into existence on the 5th January 1833, and ceased to be on the 1st February 1834. His subsequent writings contain several allusions to this |