urged him on incessantly long after he should have ceased. He gave his final reading in London, iaren 15, 1870, and in the same month appeared the first part of a new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' which promised to be one of the best of his long tie of fictions. About half of this novel was written, when its author one afternoon, whilst at dinner, was struck down by an attack of apoplexy. He lingered in a state of unconsciousness for about twenty-four hours, and died on the evening of the 9th of June 1870. He was interred in Westminster Abbey. The sudden death of an author so popular and so thoroughly national, was lamented by all classes, from the sovereign downwards, as a personal calamity. It was not merely as a humorist-though that was his great distinguishing characteristic-that Charles Dickens obtained such unexampled popularity. He was a public instructor, a reformer, and moralist. Ah!' said he, speaking of the glories of Venice, when I saw those places, how I thought that to leave one's hand upon th time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift one's self above the dust of all the doges in their graves, and stand upon a giant's staircase that Samson couldn't overthrow!' Whatever was good and amiable, bright and joyous in our life and nature, he loved, supported, and augmented by his writings; whatever was false, hypocritical, and vicious, he held up to ridicule, scorn, or contempt.

The collected works of Dickens have been published in various forms, the best being the Library Edition,' twenty-six volumes, which contains the original illustrations. A Life of Charles Dickens,' by his friend and counsellor on all occasions, Mr. John Forster, is published in three volumes.

W. M. THACKERAY.

While Dickens was in the blaze of his early fame, another master of English fiction, dealing with the realities of life and the various aspects of English society, was gradually making way in public favour, and attaining the full measure of his intellectual strength. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY-the legitimate successor of Henry Fielding-was a native of Calcutta, born in the year 1811. His family was originally from Yorkshire, but his great-grandfather, Dr. Thomas Thackeray, became Master of Harrow School. The youngest son of this Dr. Thackeray, William Makepeace, obtained an appointment in the East India Company's service; and his son Richmond Thackeray, father of the novelist, followed the same career, filling, at the time of his death in 1816 (at the early age of thirty), the office of Secretary to the Board of Revenue at Calcutta. The son, with his widowed mother, left India, and arrived in England in 1817. When I first saw England,' he said in one of his lectures, she was in mourning for the young Princess Charlotte, the hope of the empire. I came from India as a child, and our ship touched at an island on the way home. where my black servant took me a walk over rocks

and hills, till we passed a garden where we saw a man walking. "That is he," said the black man; "that is Bonaparte; he eats three sheep every day, and all the children he can lay hands on!" There were people in the British dominions besides that poor black who had an equal terror and horror of the Corsican ogre.' Young Thackeray was placed in the Charterhouse School of London, which had formerly received as gown-boys or scholars the melodious poet Crashaw, Addison, Steele, and John Wesley. Thackeray has affection ately commemorated the old Carthusian establishment in several cf his writings, and has invested it with a strong pathetic interest by making it the last refuge and death-scene of one of the finest of hia characters, Colonel Newcome. From the Charterhouse, Thackeray went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and whilst resident there in 1829, he made his first appearance as an author. In conjunction with a college friend (Mr. Lettsom), he carried on for a short time a light humorous weekly miscellany entitled 'The Snob.'

In 1830-31, he was one of at least a score of young English lads who used to live at Weimar for study, or sport, or society; all of which were to be had in the friendly little Saxon capital,' and who were received with the kindliest hospitality by the Grand Duke and Duchess.* He did not remain at college to take his degree. His great ambition was to be an artist, and for this purpose he studied at Rome and Paris. On attaining his majority, he became possessed of a considerable fortune, but some losses and speculations reduced his patrimony. At one time he lent, or rather gave, £500 to Dr. Maginn, and many other instances of his liberality might be recorded. Thackeray first became known through Frazer's Magazine,' to which he was for several years a regular contributor, under the names of Michael Angelo Titmarsh,' 'George Fitz-Boodle, Esquire,' 'Charles Yellowplush,' &c.-names typical of his artistic and satirical predilections. Tales, criticism, descriptive sketches, and poetry were all dashed off by his ready pen. They were of unequal merit, and for some time attracted little attention; but John Sterling, among others, recognised the genius of Thackeray in his tale of The Hoggarty Diamond,' and ranked its author with Fielding and Goldsmith. His style was that of the scholar combined with the shrewdness and knowledge of a man of the world. "Titmarsh' had both seen and read much. His school and college life, his foreign Ws's Life of Goethe. At this time Mr. Thackeray saw Goethe, and had the good-luck, he says, to purchase Schiller's sword, which formed a part of his costume at the court entertainments. My delight in those days,' he adds, was to make caricatures for children. I was touched to find [on revisiting We mar in 1853] that they were remembered, and some even kept until the present time; and very proud to be told, as a lad, that the great Goethe had looked at some of them.'

✦ A volume of his sketches, fragments, and drawings was published in 1875, copied by a process that gives a faithful reproduction of the original The yolume titled The Orphan of Pimlico, and was enriched with a preface and editorial notes by Miss Thackeray. The drawings display the artist's keen sense of humour and perception of character, and are more quaint and amusing than sarcastic.

travels and residence abroad, his artistic and literary experiences, even his losses,' supplied a wide field for observation, reflection, and satire. He was thirty years of age or more 'ere he made any bold push for fame. By this time the mind was fully stored and matured.

Thackeray never, we suspect, paid much attention to what Burke called the mechanical part of literature -the mere collocation of words and construction of sentences; but, of course, greater facility as well as more perfect art would be acquired by repeated efforts, The great regulators-taste, knowledge of the world, and gentlemanly feeling-he possessed ere he began to write. In 1836, as he has himself related, he offered Dickens to undertake the task of illustrating one of his works-Pickwick '-but his drawings were considered unsuitable. In the same year he joined with his step-father, Major Carmichael Smyth, and others in starting a daily newspaper, The Constitutional,' which was continued for about a twelvemonth, but proved a loss to all concerned. Thackeray entered himself of the Middle Temple, and was called to the bar (May 1848), but apparently without any intention of following the profession of the law. Under his pseudonym of Titmarsh, literary Cockney and sketcher, he had published several works-The Paris Sketch-book,' two volumes, 1840; The Second Funeral of Napoleon,' 'The Chronicle of the Drum,' 1841; and the Irish Sketch-book,' 1843 None of these became popular, though the Irish sketches are highly amusing, and contain some of Thackeray's happiest touches. The following incident, for example, is admirably told. The tourist meets with a set of jovial Irish yachtsmen, bound, like himself, for Killarney:

Car-travelling in Ireland.

The Irish car seems accommodated for any number of persons. It appeared to be full when we left Glengariff, for a traveller from Beerhaven and five gentlemen from the yacht took seats upon it with myself; and we fancied it was impossible more than seven should travel by such a conveyance, but the driver shewed the capabilities of his vehicle presently. The journey from Glenga iff to Kenmare is one of astonishing beauty; and I have seen Killarney since, and am sure that Glengariff loses nothing by comparison with this most beautiful of lakes. Rock, wood, and sea, stretch around the traveller a thousand delightful pictures; the landscape is at first wild, without being fierce, immense woods and plantations enriching the valleys. beautiful streams to be seen everywhere. Here, again, I was surprised at the great population along the road; for one saw but few cabins, and there is no village between Glengariff and Kenmare. But men and women were on the banks and in the fields: children, as usual. came trooping up to the car; and the jovial men of the vacht hd great conversation with most of the persons whom we met.on the road. A merrier set of fellows it were hard to meet. Should you like anything to drink, sir?' says one, commencing the acquaintance; we have the best wh sky in the world, and plenty of porter in the basket.' Therewith, the jolly seaman produced a long bott e of grog, which was passed round from one to another; and then began sining, shouting, laughing, roaring for the whole journey- British sailors have a knack, puli away, yeho, boys! Hurroo! my fine fellow. does your mother know you 're out? Hurroo! Tim Hurlihy? you're a fluke, Tim Hurlihy! O man sang on the roof, one hurrooed to the echo. another apostrophised the aforesaid Hurlihy, as he passed grinning on a car; a fourth had a pocket-hand

kerchief flaunting from a pole, with which he performed exercises in the face of any horseman whom he met; and great were their yells as the ponies shied off at the salutation, and he riders swerved in their saddles. In the midst of this rattling chorus we went along; gradually the country grew wilder and or desolate, and we passed through a grim mountain region, bleak and bare; the road winding round some of the innumerable hilis, and once or twice, by means of a tunnel, rushing boldly through them. One of these tunnels, they say, is a couple of hunde d yards long; and a pretty howling, I need not say, was made through that pipe of rock by the jolly yacht's crew. We saw you sketching in the blacksmith's shed at Glengariff,' says one, and we wished we had you on board. Such a jolly life as we had of it! They roved about the coast, they sailed in their vessel, they feasted off the best of fish, mutton, and whisky; they had Gamble's turtl -soup on board, and fun from morning till night, and vice versa. Gradually it came out that there was not, owing to the tremendous rains a dry corner in their ship-that they slung two in a huge hammock in the cabin, and that one of their crew had been ill, and shirked off. What a wonderful thing pleasure is! to be wet all day and night; to be scorched and blistered by the sun and ran; to beat in and out of little harbours, and to exceed diurnly upon whisky punch. Faith, Londen and an arm-chair at the club are more to the tastes of some inen!

The pencil of Titmarsh, in this and some other of his works, comes admirably in aid of his pen; and the Irish themselves confessed that their people, cabins and costume had never been more faithfully depicted. About the time that these Irish sketches appeared, their author was contributing under his alter ego of Fitz-Boodle, to 'Fraser's Magazine' his tale of Barry Lyndon,' which appears to us the best of his short stories. It is a relation of the adventures of an Irish picaroon, or gambler and fortune-hunter, and abounds in racy humor and striking incidents. The commencement of Punch' -the wittiest of periodicals-in 1841 opened up a new field for Thackeray, and his papers signed The Fat Contributor,' soon became famous. These were followed by Jeames's Diary' and the 'Snob Papers,' distinguished by their inimitable vein of irony and wit; and he also made various contributions in verse. A journey to the East next led to 'Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, by way of Lisbon, Athens, Constantinople and Jerusalem, by M. A. Titmarsh. This volume appeared in 1846; and in the following year he issued a small Christmas book, Mrs. Perkins's Ball.' But before this time Thackeray had commenced, in monthly parts, his story of Vanity Fair, a Novel without a Hero,' illustrated by himself, or, to use his own expression, 'illuminated with the author's own candles.' The first number appeared in February, 1847. Every month added to the popularity of this work; and ere it was concluded it was obvious that Thackeray's probationary period was past -that Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Fitz-Boodle would disappear from Fraser,' and their author take his place in his own proper name and person as one of the first of English novelists, and the greatest social satirist of his age.

In regularity of story and consistency of detail-though these by no means constitute Thackeray's strength- Vanity Fair' greatly excels any of his previous works, while in delineation of character it stands pre-eminent. Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley-one recog.

nized as the 'impersonation of intellect without virtue, and the other as that of virtue without intellect '-are not only perfectly original characters, but are drawn with so much dramatic power, knowledge of life, and shrewd observation, as to render them studies in human nature and moral anatomy. Amidst all her selfishness, Becky preserves a portion of the reader's sympathy, and we follow her with unabated interest through her vicissitudes as French teacher, gover.ess, the wife of the heavy dragoon, the lady of fashion, and even the desperate and degraded swindler. From part of this demoralisation we could have wished that Becky had been spared by her historian, and the story would have been complete, morally and artistically, without it. But there are few scenes, even the most cynical and humiliating, that the reader desires to strike out: all have such an air of truth, and are lively, biting, and humorous. The novelist had soared far beyond the region of mere town-life and snobbism. He had also greatly heightened the interest felt in his characters by connecting them with historical events and places. We have a picture of Brussels in 1815; and as Fielding in Tom Jones' glanced at some of the incidents of the Jacobite rising in '45, Thackeray reproduced, as it were, the terrors a..d anxieties felt by thousands as to the issue of the great struggles at Quatre Bras and Waterloo.

Having completed Vanity Fair,' Thackeray published another Christmas volume, 'Our Street,' 1848, to which a companion-volume, 'Dr. Birch and his Young Friends,' was added next year. He had also entered upon another monthly serial-his second great work— The History of Pendennis (1849-1:50). This was an attempt to describe the gentlemen of the present age-'no better nor worse than most educated men.' And even these educated men, according to the satirist, cannot be painted as they are, with the notorious foibles and selfishness of their education. 'Since the author of "Tom Jones" was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost powers a man. We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the natural in our art.' This is rather too broadly stated, but society, no doubt, considers that it would not be benefited by such toleration. Thackeray, however, has done more than most men to strip off conventional disguises and hypocrisies, and he affords glimpses of the interdicted region-too near at times, but without seeking to render evil attractive. His hero, Pendennis, is scarcely a higher model of humanity than Tom Jones, though the difference in national manners and feelings, brought about during a hundred years, has saved him from some of the descents into which Jones was almost perforce drawn. Thackeray's hero falls in love at sixteen, his juvenile flame being a young actress, who jilts him on finding that his fortune is not what she believed it to be. This boyish passion, contrasted with the character of the actress and that of her father-a drunken Irish