1811, about one year before Dickens; so they entered upon their illustrious careers passibus æquis.

Thackeray's father died in 1815, but his mother and himself remained for a short time in India. Fearing, however, the effect of the climate on the boy's health, his mother sent him to England in 1817, and soon after she married Major Carmichael Smyth, who was always a kind guardian of her son. On his way to England the ship landed at St. Helena, where the great Napoleon was then in exile. The boy saw the fallen warrior, and his youthful fancy depicted him as an ogre, for a negro whom he met told him that "Bonaparte ate three sheep every day and all the children he could lay his hands on." In 1822 he was entered at the Charter-House school, the peculiar and interesting life of which he has so often described under the name of "Grayfriars." In 1828 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was associated with Tennyson. He did not remain long enough to take his degree, but while there, in 1829, he edited a little paper called The Snob, the germ of his later contributions to Punch, collected and published afterward in The Book of Snobs. In 1831 he went to Weimar. As a young man with comfortable means, he enjoyed himself; and, thinking he discerned in himself a talent for drawing, he began to make caricatures and sketches after the manner of Hogarth. Later he went to Rome. On his return to England he began to write, and his earliest pieces are contributions to Fraser's Magazine. The vein of caricature in art was merged into satire and ridicule from the pen, and people had hardly begun to inquire who was the author of the extravaganzas of Charles Yellow

plush-a caustic Malaprop who read and analyzed books-when Michael Angelo Titmarsh appeared upon the scene and eclipsed the glories of Yellowplush. In 1836 he established, with his stepfather, Major Smyth, a newspaper called The Constitutional and Public Ledger; it was very liberal, but after less than a year of life it was abandoned.

About this time Thackeray married Miss Shaw, with the promise of a very happy life, soon, alas! to be marred by the mental condition of his wife. With the failing of his paper and other unfortunate speculations, his snug little fortune of twenty thousand pounds had melted away, and he had to depend upon his exertions for a livelihood. He was always very fond of Paris, crossing over whenever he could, living in the Latin Quarter, among the students, a somewhat Bohemian life. He now began to write in earnest and with a purpose. Between the years 1837 and 1840 he wrote Stubbs's Calendar; Catherine, by Ikey Solomons, Esq.; The Shabby-Genteel Story, which was left unfinished at the ninth chapter. In 1840 appeared, in the form of sketches from Fraser's Magazine, The Paris Sketch-Book ; The Great Hoggarty Diamond appeared in the numbers of Fraser's Magazine from September to December. These were speedily followed by Fitz-Boodle's Confessions, The Irish Sketch-Book, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and in 1844 he issued his papers From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, the result of a free pass-" a round-ticket "-presented to him by the company. In 1846 appeared Mrs. Perkin's Ball.

Had Thackeray done nothing more than the works thus tabularly enumerated, he

would have been known as an easy writer in a comic vein of not a high tone, and would have left nothing to after-times. The reading public merely knew that there was such a struggling writer, when the first number of his Vanity Fair came out, in February, 1847; it was completed in seventeen numbers. Indifference gave way to interest; interest was succeeded by enthusiasm: it was an immense success. Becky Sharp and Amelia Osborn, Rawdon Crawley and the marquis of Steyne, were on every tongue. Thackeray was a famous man. Could he live up to his fame? Besides some Christmas books which were, of course, received with favor-he came out in 1849 with Pendennis, which even increased his reputation. In 1851 he lectured in England and America on "The English Humorists," and was very successful. In 1852 appeared his greatest work-considered from the point of view of literary criticism-Henry Esmond, so thoroughly conceived in the spirit and expressed in the language of Queen Anne's time that the illusion is perfect; the reader joins the crowds and ranks and courts of which he reads, and assists in the historic mise en scène. The Virginians, the sequel to Esmond, does not approach it in excellence. In 1855 appeared his most popular novel, The Newcomes, read with avidity by average people who find Henry Esmond a little too historical, and enjoyed by all. In 1856 he delivered his lectures on "The

names and figures for the Newgate Calendar. In 1857 he stood for Oxford, but was defeated by a slight vote.

In 1860 the Cornhill Magazine was started, with Thackeray as editor; it had an immense subscription-list, but it was soon manifest to himself that he was not. the person for such an undertaking, and so before long he retired from the post, but continued to write for it. In that appeared his "Roundabout Papers" and "The Adventures of Philip in his Way through the World." In 1862 he took a long lease of a house at Kensington, near the palace, intending to repair it, but, instead, he pulled it down and rebuilt it. It was finished— | spacious and beautiful: he might hope for great comfort under the protection of his household gods. He had started a new novel in serial numbers, which had already progressed to four numbers. On Wednesday morning, December 23, 1863, he said he did not feel well. His valet, Charles Sargent, tended him during the day, and left him at eleven at night. The next morning he was found dead in his bed, of an effusion on the brain. He was buried at Kensal Green on the 30th of December, leaving no one behind him to fill his place.

THE LAST DAYS OF CHIVALRY.

in England. Never did royal sin and royal bestiality receive so scathing a punishment; for him there is no royal immunity, and the house of Hanover, reft of crown and sceptre, stands at the touch of his magic wand fit

Ecolampadius to Basel. He was a man of extensive and generous projects. Charles V. was to have been the youthful hero destined to realize his golden age, but Hütten, when he saw his hopes on that head

come to nothing, had turned to Sickingen, and sought to obtain from chivalry what had been refused him by the empire. Sickingen, as the leading man among the feudal nobility, had acted a great part in Germany, but ere long the princes besieged him in his castle of Landstein, and those new arms, cannons and cannon-balls, brought tumbling down those ancient battlements that had been used to blows of a different kind. The taking of Landstein proved the final downfall of chivalry, the decisive victory of artillery over lances and bucklers, the triumph of modern times over the Middle Ages. Thus was the last effort of expiring chivalry to be in favor of the Reformation, the first effort of the new system of warfare to be against it. The mail-clad men who fell beneath the unlooked-for shot, and who lay dead or dying amid the ruins of Landstein, were superseded by a different kind of knights.

All Hütten's hopes fell with the fall of Landstein and of chivalry. Over the dead body of Sickingen he bade farewell to the glorious days which his imagination had fondly pictured to him, and, renouncing all trust in man, he now only looked for a little obscurity and repose. He repaired to the small island of Ufnau, on the Lake of Zurich. It was in that peaceful and obscure retreat, after a life of great agitation, that Ulrich von Hütten, one of the most remarkable geniuses of the sixteenth century, died unnoticed, about the end of August, 1523. With him chivalry may be said to have breathed its last. He left behind him neither money, books nor furniture, except ing only a pen.

JEAN HENRI MERLE D'AUBIGNÉ.

THE parrot, which is said to have been

first introduced into Europe by Alexander the Great, is the best known among us of all foreign birds, as it unites the greatest beauty with the greatest docility. But its chief attraction is to be found in its ability to utter articulate sounds—a gift which it possesses in far greater perfection than any other bird. Its voice, also, is more like a man's than any other: the raven is too hoarse and the jay and magpie too shrill to resemble the truth, but the parrot's note is of the true pitch and capable of a variety of modulations. For this it is indebted to the form of its bill, tongue and head: "Its bill, round on the outside and hollow within, has in some degree the capacity of a mouth and allows the tongue to play freely, and the sound, striking against the circular border of the lower mandible, is there modified as on a row of teeth, while the concavity of the upper mandible reflects it like a palate; hence the animal does not utter a whistling sound, but a full articulation. The tongue, which modulates all sounds, is proportionably larger than in man, and would be more voluble were it not harder than flesh and invested with a strong horny membrane." In addition to the talent of speech, the parrot - is endowed with a strong memory, and with more sagacity than is the lot of most other birds.

The ease with which this bird is taught to speak and the great number of words which it is capable of repeating are equally surprising. We are assured by a grave

writer that one of these was taught to repeat a whole sonnet from Petrarch; and "that I may not be wanting in my instance," says a late writer, "I have seen a parrot belonging to a distiller who had suffered pretty largely in his circumstances from an informer who lived opposite him very ridiculously employed. This bird was taught to pronounce the ninth commandment, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,' with a very clear, loud, articulate voice. The bird was generally placed in its cage over against the informer's house, and delighted the whole neighborhood with its persevering exhortations."

เ

Willoughby tells a story of a parrot which is not so dull as those usually brought up when this bird's facility of talking happens to be the subject. A parrot belonging to King Henry VII., who then resided at Westminster, in his palace by the river Thames, had learned to talk many words from the passengers as they happened to take water. One day, sporting on its perch, the poor bird fell into the water, at the same time crying out as loud as he could, "A boat! Twenty pound for a boat!" A waterman who happened to be near, hearing the cry, made to the place where the parrot was floating, and, taking him up, restored him to the king. As it seems the bird was a favorite, the man insisted that he ought to have a reward rather equal to his service than his trouble, and, as the parrot had cried "Twenty pounds," he said the king was bound in honor to grant it. The king at last agreed to leave it to the parrot's own determination; which the bird hearing, cried out, "Give the knave a groat.'

The sagacity which parrots show in a domestic state seems also natural to them in their native residence among the woods. They live together in flocks and mutually assist each other against other animals, either by their courage or their notes of warning. They generally breed in hollow trees, where they make a round hole, and do not line their nest within. If they find any part of a tree beginning to rot from the breaking off of a branch or any such accident, this they take care to scoop, and to make the hole sufficiently wide and convenient; but it sometimes happens that they are content with the hole which a woodpecker has wrought out with greater ease before them, and in this they prepare to hatch and bring up their young. The female lays two or three eggs about the size of those of a pigeon and marked with little. specks. The natives are very assiduous in seeking their nests, and usually take them by cutting down the tree. by cutting down the tree. By this means, indeed, the young parrots are liable to be killed; but if one of them survive, it is considered as a sufficient recompense. The old ones are shot with heavy arrows headed with cotton, which knock them down without killing them. The food commonly given. to these birds consists of hempseed, nuts, fruits of every kind and bread soaked in wine; they would prefer meat, but that kind of aliment has been found to make them dull and heavy, and to cause their feathers to drop off after some time. It has been observed that they keep their food in a kind of pouch, from which they afterward throw it up in the same manner as ruminating animals.

Translation of JOHN WRIGHT,

When ardent he pursues the savage beast!
But he alone dares fight against the god :
He must be warned of this by thee, my
father,

And me, nor pride him in pernicious wisdom. Where is he? To my presence who will call him,

That he may see me happy in my prize?

CAD. He was like you, and reverenced not the god,

no more

chain

Of ruin-him and you to desolate

The house, and me, who, destitute of sons,

And her unhappy sisters. If there be

A man whose impious pride contemns the

gods,