word, the world is not likely ever to find this out; it is a matter which each man must determine for himself. But the world can perhaps ascertain what special services Mr. Thackeray has rendered; and it is this probably which Mr. Trollope means. His great service has been in his exposure of the prevailing faults of his time. Among the foremost are the faults of affectation and pretence, but there is one yet more grievous than these the sceptical spirit of the age. This he has depicted in the gentlest and saddest of all his books, Pendennis: "And it will be seen that the lamentable stage to which his logic at present has brought him" (Arthur Pendennis), "is one of general scepticism and sneering acquiescence in the world as it is; or if you like so to call it, a belief qualified with scorn in all things extant. And to what does this easy and sceptical life lead a man? Friend Arthur was a Sadducee, and the Baptist might be in the wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher's awful accents and denunciations of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd, and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato, or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak-the more shameful, because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition." The delineation is not a pleasant one, but it is true. The feeling hardly deserves to be called scepticism; it is rather a calm indifferentism; a putting aside of all things sacred. And as the Sadducees of Judea were, on the whole, better men than the Pharisees, so this modern Sadducean feeling prevails not only among the cultivated classes, but among those conspicuously honourable and upright. These men, in fact, want spiritual guides and teachers. The clergy do not supply this want; most of them refuse to acknowledge its existence; Mr. Thackeray, with his fearless truthfulness, sees it, and tells it. To cure it is not within his province. As a lay-preacher, only the secondary principles of morality are at his command. each, pray God, a gentleman," is his highest sanction. But though he cannot tell the afflicted whither to turn, it is no slight thing to have laid bare the disorder from which so many suffer, and which all, with culpable cowardice, study to conceal. And he does more than lay bare the disorder; he convinces us how serious it is. He does this by showing us its evil effect on a good and kindly nature. No teaching can be more impressive than the contrast between Pendennis under "Be How he represents the Temper of the Age. 259 the influence of this sceptical spirit, and Warrington, over whom, crushed as he is by hopeless misfortune, it has no power. The minor vices of affectation and pretension he assails directly. To do this was his especial mission from the first. What success may have attended his efforts we cannot certainly tell. It is to be feared, however, that, despite his teaching, snobs, like poverty, will never cease out of the land. But all who feel guilty and every one of us is guilty more or less --and who desire to amend, should use the means: the "Book of Snobs" should be read carefully at least once a year. His was not the hortatory method. He had no notion that much could be done by telling people to be good. He found it more telling to show that by being otherwise they were in danger of becoming unhappy, ridiculous, and contemptible. Yet he did not altogether neglect positive teaching. Many passages might be taken from his works-even from the remorseless "Book of Snobs" itself-which inculcate the beauty of goodness; and the whole tendency of his writings, from the first to the last line he penned during a long and active literary life, has invariably been to inspire reverence for manliness and purity and truth. And to sum up all, in representing after his measure the characteristics of the age, Mr. Thackeray has discharged one of the highest functions of a writer. His keen insight into modern life has enabled him to show his readers that life fully; his honesty and high tone of mind has enabled him to do this truly. Hence he is the healthiest of writers. In his pages we find no false stimulus, no pernicious ideals, no vulgar aims. We are led to look at things as they really are, and to rest satisfied with our place among them. Each man learns that he can do much if he preserves moderation; that if he goes beyond his proper sphere he is good for nothing. He teaches us to find a fitting field for action in our peculiar studies or business, to reap lasting happiness in the affections which are common to all. Our vague longings are quieted; our foolish ambitions checked; we are soothed into contentment with obscurity-encouraged in an honest determination to do our duty. A "Roundabout Paper" on the theme Nil nisi bonum concludes thus: "Here are two literary men gone to their account; and, laus Deo, as far as we know, it is fair, and open, and clean. Here is no need of apologies for shortcomings, or explanations of vices which would have been virtues but for unavoidable, etc. Here are two examples of men most differently gifted: each pursuing his calling; each speaking his truth as God bade him; each honest in his life; just and irreproachable in his dealings; dear to his friends; honoured by his country; beloved at his fireside. It has been the fortunate lot of both to give incalculable happiness and delight to the world, which thanks them in return with an immense kindliness, respect, affection. It may not be our chance, brother scribe, to be endowed with such merit, or rewarded with such fame. But the rewards of these men are rewards paid to our service. We may not win the baton or epaulettes; but God give us strength to guard the honour of the flag!" The prayer was granted: he had strength given him always to guard the honour of the flag; and now his name is worthy to be placed beside the names of Washington Irving and Lord Macaulay, as of one no whit less deserving the praise of these noble words. We have seen no satisfactory portrait of Mr. Thackeray. We like the photographs better than the prints; and we have an old daguerreotype of him without his spectacles which is good; but no photograph can give more of a man than is in any one ordinary-often very ordinary-look of him; it is only Sir Joshua and his brethren who can paint a man liker than himself. Laurence's first drawing has much of his thoroughbred look, but the head is too much tossed up and vif. The photograph from the later drawing by the same hand we like better: he is alone, and reading with his book close up to his eyes. This gives the prodigious size and solidity of his head, and the sweet mouth. We have not seen that by Mr. Watts, but if it is as full of power and delicacy as his Tennyson, it will be a comfort. Though in no sense a selfish man, he had a wonderful interest in himself as an object of study, and nothing could be more delightful and unlike anything else than to listen to him on himself. He often draws his own likeness in his books. In the "Fraserians" by Maclise, in Fraser, is a slight sketch of him in his unknown youth; and there is an excessively funny and not unlike extravaganza of him by Doyle or Leech, in the Month, a little short-lived periodical, edited by Albert Smith. He is represented lecturing, when certainly he looked his best. We give below what is like him in face as well as in more. The tired, young, kindly wag is sitting and looking into space, his mask and his jester's rod lying idly on his knees. The foregoing estimate of his genius must stand instead of any special portraiture of the man. Yet we would mention two leading traits of character traceable, to a large extent, in his works, though finding no appropriate place in a literary criticism of them. One was the deep steady melancholy of his nature. He was fond of telling how on one occasion, at Paris, he found himself in a great crowded salon; and looking from the one end across the sea of heads, being in Swift's place of calm in a crowd,' he saw at the other end a strange visage, staring at him with an expression of comical woebegoneness. After a little he found that this rueful being was himself in the mirror. He was not, indeed, morose. He was alive to and thankful for everyday blessings, great and small; for the happiness of home, for friendship, for wit and music, for beauty of all kinds, for the pleasures of the "faithful old gold pen;" now running into some felicitous expression, now playing itself into some droll initial letter; nay, even for the creature comforts. But his persistent state, especially for the later half of his life, was profoundly morne -there is no other word for it. This arose in part from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness of mankind. His keen perception of the meanness and vulgarity of the realities around him contrasted with the ideal present to his mind could produce no other effect. This feeling, embittered by disappointment, acting on a harsh and savage nature, ended in the sacva indignatio of Swift; acting on the kindly and too sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, it led only to compassionate sadness. In part, too, this melancholy was the result of private calamities. He alludes to these often in his writings, and a knowledge that his sorrows were great is necessary to the perfect appreciation of much of his deepest pathos. We allude to them here, painful as the subject is, mainly because they have given rise to stories some quite untrue, some even cruelly injurious. The loss of his second child in infancy was always an abiding sorrow-described in the "Hoggarty Diamond," in a passage of surpassing tenderness, too sacred to be severed from its context. A yet keener and more constantly present affliction was the illness of his wife. He married her in Paris when he was "mewing his mighty youth," preparing for the great career which awaited him. One likes to think on these early days of happiness, when he could draw and write with that loved companion by his side: he has himself sketched the picture :-"The humblest painter, be he ever so poor, may have a friend watching at his easel, or a gentle wife sitting by with her work in her lap, and with fond smiles or talk or silence, cheering his labours." After some years of marriage, Mrs. Thackeray caught a fever, 1 "An inch or two above it." brought on by imprudent exposure at a time when the effects of such ailments are more than usually lasting both on the system and the nerves. She never afterwards recovered so as to be able to be with her husband and children. But she has been from the first intrusted to the good offices of a kind family, tenderly cared for, surrounded with every comfort by his unwearied affection. The beautiful lines in the ballad of the Bouillabaisse" are well known : 66 : In one of the latest Roundabouts we have this touching confession :- I own for my part that, in reading pages which this hand penned formerly, I often lose sight of the text under my eyes. It is not the words I see; but that past day; that bygone page of life's history; that tragedy, comedy it may be, which our little home-company was enacting; that merry-making which we shared; that funeral which we followed; that bitter, bitter grief which we buried." But all who knew him know well, and love to recall, how these sorrows were soothed and his home made a place of happiness by his two daughters and his mother, who were his perpetual companions, delights, and blessings, and whose feeling of inestimable loss now will be best borne and comforted by remembering how they were everything to him, as he was to them. His sense of a higher Power, his reverence and godly fear, is felt more than expressed as indeed it mainly should always be-in everything he wrote. It comes out at times quite suddenly, and stops at once, in its full strength. We could readily give many instances of this. One we give, as it occurs very early, when he was probably little more than six-and-twenty; it is from the paper, "Madame Sand and the New Apocalypse." Referring to Henri Heine's frightful words, "Dieu qui se meurt," "Dieu est mort," and to the wild godlessness of Spiridion, he thus bursts out:-"O awful, awful name of God! Light unbearable! mystery unfathomable! vastness immeasurable! Who are these who come forward to explain the mystery, and gaze unblinking into the depths of the light, and measure the immeasurable vastness to a hair? O name that God's people of old did fear to utter! O light that God's |