The reverse of good taste must be predicated of Mr. Thackeray's Christmas story, which will neither serve its purpose nor add to the reputation of its author. We are happy to think it will not greatly please many children. There are some whom it may, but to them it can do little harm. They have little of the bloom of childhood to be impaired. They are weary of balls, of theatres, of puppet-shows; they have waltzed, they have flirted, they have supped; they are blasés at four years old, and satiated with literature at seven, and may lay Mr. Thackeray's book down with a yawn of approval like that of the weary novel-grinder of fifty, when she declares that the Heir of Redclyffe is "a pretty book." They, perhaps, can appreciate his satire and his parodies, pronounce judgment on the appropriateness of his footmen's dialect, and enjoy the thorough child-about-town air of which the whole is redolent. The affectation of fineness is the weakness most disagreeable in Mr. Thackeray, and so strong is his recoil from it, that he has come to consider it simplicity and good manners to be vulgar. He is like a schoolboy who thinks he must be rude to his sisters to show his manliness; and so assiduously and unremittingly has he devoted himself to hunting out and gibbeting the weaknesses of footmen and the vulgarity of "snobs," that his genius has become, like the dyer's hand, subdued to the element it works in. There is a vulgarity of false assumption which offers a fair and tempting subject to the satirist; there is also a vulgarity per se. Nothing is easier and falser than to condemn refinement as affectation, and to assume the absence of it as an indication of candour and high principle, just as some years ago it was the fashion to represent prodigality and recklessness as the invariable symptoms of benevolence and generosity of disposition. The model Prince Giglio is an extremely vulgar and stupid young man, and his exquisite burst of honourable feeling at the end is more out of place than Charles Surface's refusal to sell his old uncle; for la

vishness has some affinity with kindliness of disposition, whereas coarseness of grain has none with a quick and strong sense of personal honour. It is not impossible for the two to be found together; but we must not be supposed to agree with our author in esteeming the particular exhibition of a nice sense of honour displayed by Prince Giglio to be worthy of the grand dénouement of fairy approbation which it obtains. A man who has been cheated out of his signature to a promise of marriage by an old woman who tells him it is an order for coals, and thinks it his duty to desert his bride at the altar in order to be faithful to such an engagement, is not honourable; he is simply a fool.

It is not easy to draw the line where refinement becomes false by overstrained conventionalities, or where, on the other side, the neglect of it melts into vulgarity; but the distinction is as true as that between the kindred manifestations of physical beauty and ugliness; and the presence of the one or the other is more easily appreciable by a cultivated taste than capable of demonstration to the understanding. It might not be very difficult to prove by reasoning that the style which Mr. Thackeray deems adapted to children is vulgar, and debasing as far as utterly false taste is debasing; but the instincts of his readers will be a far shorter, and not less just, means of conviction. This is how lovers quarrel in the Rose and the Ring:

'Giglio said, 'O Angelica, Angelica, I didn't think this of you. This wasn't your language to me when you gave me this ring, and I gave you mine in the garden, and you gave me that k

But what k- was we never shall know, for Angelica, in a rage, cried, 'Get out, you saucy, rude creature! How dare you to remind me of your rudeness! As for your little trumpery twopenny ring, there, sir, there!' And she flung it out of the window.

'It was my mother's marriage-ring,' cried Giglio.

'I don't care whose marriage-ring it was,' cries Angelica. 'Marry the person who picks it up, if she's a woman; you shan't

marry me. And give me back my ring. I've no patience with people who boast about the things they give away! I know who'll give me much finer things than you ever gave me. A beggarly ring indeed, not worth five shillings!'

Now Angelica little knew that the ring which Giglio had given her was a fairy ring: if a man wore it, it made all the women in love with him; if a woman, all the gentlemen. The Queen, Giglio's mother, quite an ordinary-looking person, was admired immensely while she wore this ring, and her husband was frantic when she was ill. But when she called her little Giglio to her, and put the ring on his finger, King Savio did not seem to care for his wife so much any more, but transferred all his love to little Giglio. So did every body love him as long as he had the ring; but when, as quite a child, he gave it to Angelica, people began to love and admire her; and Giglio, as the saying is, played only second fiddle.

'Yes,' says Angelica, going on in her foolish ungrateful way, 'I know who'll give me much finer things than your beggarly little pearl nonsense.'

Very good, Miss! You may take back your ring, too!' says Giglio, his, eyes flashing fire at her; and then, as if his eyes had been suddenly opened, he cried out, 'Ha, what does this mean? Is this the woman I have been in love with all my life? Have I been such a ninny as to throw away ny regard upon you? Why-actually-yes-you are a little crooked!' 'O, you wretch !' cries Angelica.

'And, upon my conscience, you-you squint a little !'
"Eh!' cries Angelica.

'And your hair is red-and you are marked with the small-pox-and, what? you have three false teeth-and one leg shorter than the other!'

'You brute, you brute, you!' Angelica screamed out: and as she seized the ring with one hand, she dealt Giglio one, two, three smacks on the face, and would have pulled the hair off his head had he not started laughing, and crying,

'O dear me, Angelica, don't pull out my hair, it hurts! You might remove a great deal of your own, as I perceive, without scissors or pulling at all. O, ho, ho! ha, ha, ha! he, he, he !'

And he nearly choked himself with laughing, and she with rage, when, with a low bow, and dressed in his court-habit, Count Gambabella, the first lord-in-waiting, entered and said, 'Royal Highnesses, their Majesties expect you in the Pink Throne-room, where they await the arrival of the Prince of CRIM TARTARY.''

This, or worse, is the general tenor of the work, interspersed with burlesque passages, such as Mr. Thackeray pretty well satiated the public with in "Rebecca and Rowena." In that, however, there was the point of a specific parody, which is here wanting. Children will read this, as they will any thing that is not insufferably prosy; but we apprehend that those whose tastes are not already a good deal injured will better like better things, and we are not without a hope that to most of them it will appear dull. Persons of sense, however, will not, we think, give their children the opportunity of pronouncing an opinion upon it. Mr. Thackeray mistakes the bent of his genius very much when he undertakes to write for children. His is no food for young rosy lips, but stimulative diet for jaded appetites. Of course even the present work is not without his peculiar cleverness, but all who are familiar with his vein will understand that his humour is not of a kind to be very readily appreciated by those for whom it professes to be written. The joke of the book consists in attributing to the Royal Families of Paflagonia and Crim Tartary the slang language and slang habits of modern society, and representing them with the foibles and habits of that portion of the middle class which the author loves best to caricature. This is interspersed with passages of pantomime bombast, the aim apparently being to sound the depths of absurdity. But utter absurdity must be very nicely managed not to degenerate into trash. Mr. Lear has written and illustrated a "Book of Nonsense" which every one knows and every child delights in. It has not a grain of sense either in the letter-press or the illustrations from cover to cover, yet it has good taste, good fun, and pleasant humour. If Mr. Lear's success shows that it is possible to dispense with the assistance of sense, Mr. Thackeray's attempt is a warning, on the other hand, that it is a dangerous experiment to make.

510

CHILDREN'S FAIRY-TALES, AND GEORGE
CRUIKSHANK.*

[Reprinted from The Inquirer.]

ENGRAVING is a limited field, but these limited fields of art often afford scope for the display of a special genius which would nowhere else have found opportunity for its development. Where the engraver occupies himself merely in reproducing the original works of others, however exquisite may be his mechanical skill, and however nice and accurate his perceptions, he is certainly on quite another level than the painter or the sculptor. Where, however, the engraver, using the word in its widest sense, chooses to make his graver the instrument for developing his own conceptions, he is truly an artist, and may find in his peculiar mode of execution an expression peculiarly suited to his genius. Two names will occur to every mind, of men who have found their fittest field in this peculiar corner of art. Bewick and Cruikshank, both men of true genius, felt that Nature meant them neither to draw nor to paint, but to engrave. Those vignettes to the "Birds" or to " Esop's Fables" could never have been painted. Colour could have added nothing to those quaint little touches of the grotesque and humorous; it would have ruined them. Think of the one where that intent kitchen-maid is pegging up her clothes on the drying-line; she is wrapt up in the occupation of the moment, but has unfortunately left the garden-gate open, and the denizens of the farmyard are deliberately tres

*George Cruikshank's Fairy Library. Hop-o'-my-Thumb and the Seven-League Boots. don, David Bogue. 1854.

Jack and the Bean-stalk. Lon