for meaning what they say when they use warm language to strange women. Would you have had me make love in fact, as well as on paper?

THACK. We are not now, sir, upon the virtue of continence, but on that of sincerity. To write impassioned letters to ladies for whom you feel none of the passion which your words express, reveals a lack of sincerity, a levity and artificiality of nature which all honest and truthful men must lament to find in a writer so eminent as yourself.

STERNE. I am vastly obliged to them to be sure, and should be even more so if I could guess the reason for their concern with my character.

THACK. They find something additionally painful too, Mr. Sterne, in your attentions to what you call your "Dulcineas," because of the coldness, as they think it, of your marital sentiments. They suspect you of having neglected your wife; and disapproval of your numerous flirtations, as we style them, was strengthened by sympathy for her.

STERNE. Mrs. Sterne, then, is vastly obliged to them also. She, I dare say, will be as unaware as I was, that our conjugal relations were any affair of posterity's; but a woman will be glad of even a posthumous grievance.

THACK. Your evidently sincere regard for your daughter

STERNE. Stay, sir! I will beg you to pause there. My feelings towards my Lydia can, I am sure, be no one's affair but ours. But upon my word, Mr. Thackeray, the state of manners appears to have strangely altered between

my own day and yours. There were, in my day, some precisians who found in Tristram Shandy what they had no business to be looking for, and who condemned me something too freely in consequence. But no one had the impertinence to write in the Gentleman's Magazine or the Public Advertiser that the ingenious author of Tristram Shandy was on ill terms with his wife, and that 'twas no wonder such a man should write lewdly. Tittle-tattle, sir, of that kind was left to the prints that lived by providing it. A candid critic was thought to have no concern with it. THACK. Criticism, Mr. Sterne, goes deeper into things in these days. It has more material to work upon than in your time, and better understands the use of what it has. To know the private history of a writer is to enable us to understand much that would otherwise be obscure in the character of his writings. We interpret the author by

his life.

STERNE. God save us, Mr. Thackeray! This is ill news indeed! I know not who among us but the very worst can be pleased to hear it.

THACK. The very worst?

STERNE. Ay, sir! In order to escape this critical prying that you tell me of a man must have been so conscious of his faults as to have concealed them from the world. You interpret the author by his life you say. But suppose you know nothing of his life?

THACK. Then we do without the knowledge as best we can. We read him as he would have been read by a man of intelligence in his own day, who knew nothing of him but his name, and we criticise him accordingly.

STERNE. And suppose you know only so much of his life as to deceive you into thinking better of him than he deserved.

THACK. Such a thing as that, Mr. Sterne, is not very likely to happen to a man's posterity.

STERNE. Is it not, sir?

Then, by Heaven, I wish

For I can assure you

posterity joy of its penetration. that the mistake was common enough in my own time with regard to those among whom I lived, and I should have supposed it to be the same in yours. But, however, Mr. Thackeray, it would have been well for us unfortunate authors of a past generation had we known by what rule our writings would have received censure. We should then doubtless have better understood the value of a mask of virtue; and that while the writer who wears his heart upon his sleeve might just hope to shelter himself under a life of obscurity against detraction in the future, the surest way to the favour of posterity was to study the arts of the hypocrite and mix freely with the world.

LORD PALMERSTON AND RICHARD COBDEN.

PAL. He avoids me, and no wonder. I suppose I ought to respect his embarrassment; but I am sorely tempted to I think I must-by Jove! I will. He was a good fellow at bottom, and will not take a little banter amiss, I feel sure . . . . Mr. Cobden !

COB. Lord Palmerston! . . . . Dear me! This is rather unfortunate. I was particularly anxious not to intrude upon him in his discomfiture. However, if he seeks the interview himself, I suppose I need feel no delicacy in consenting to it. . . . You were about to say?—————

PAL. What a limbo of repentance for statesmen, Mr. Cobden, are these same Elysian Fields.

COB. Indeed they are, my lord. . . . Come, that's well at any rate. He seems to retain all his old good humour

under defeat.

PAL. You must feel, I should think, like an unlucky tipster on the day after the Derby.

COB. I do not quite catch your meaning.

PAL. Oh, I forgot you were not a sporting man.

Well,

did you ever watch a game at skittles? If so, don't you feel now as if you were looking on while history plays at ninepins with your prophecies ?

COB. Prophecies, Lord Palmerston? My prophecies? I thought you were talking of your own policy.

PAL. The deuce you did? Then that accounts for your good-natured composure. You expected to find me on the stool of repentance.

COB. Undoubtedly, my lord; and it was because I was unwilling to add to the natural mortification of such a position that I have held aloof from you.

PAL. Mr. Cobden, I am extremely obliged to you. And now let me tell you that I have avoided you for precisely the same reason.

COB. I suppose, then, that I ought to feel equally grateful to you, but upon my word, I find a difficulty in conjuring up any emotion of the kind.

PAL. Then, sir, you are the more to be pitied: for if ever there was a discredited prophet who ought to feel grateful to any old friend for trying not to catch his eye, it is the distinguished economist and politician whom I have the honour of addressing.

COB. I must ask you to enlighten me further. I am not aware that I was much given to indulgence in prophecy in the upper world. To tell the truth, I found the affairs of the present too absorbing to allow me much time to think about the future.

PAL. Perhaps so, as a general rule. But the interests of the present and the hopes of the future were very closely associated in the great question which inspired you with the prophetic afflatus.

COB. Pray do not keep me in suspense, my lord. Repeat to me some of my deceiving oracles.