THACKERAY'S DEATH.

HIS great writer-our greatest novelist since Scott (and in some senses greater, because deeper, more to the quick, more naked than he), our foremost wit and man of letters since Macaulay— has been taken from us with an awful unexpectedness. He was found dead in bed on the morning of 24th December 1863. This is to us so great a personal as well as public calamity, that we feel little able to order our words aright or to see through our blinding tears.

Mr. Thackeray was so much greater, so much nobler than his works, great and noble as they are, that it is difficult to speak of him without apparent excess. What a loss to the world the disappearance of that large, acute, and fine understanding; that searching, inevitable inner and outer eye; that keen and yet kindly satiric touch; that wonderful humour and play of soul! And then such a mastery of his mother tongue! such a style! such nicety of word and turn! such a flavour of speech! such genuine originality of genius and expression ! such an insight

into the hidden springs of human action! such a dissection of the nerves to their ultimate fibrilla! such a sense and such a sympathy for the worth and for the misery of man! such a power of bringing human nature to its essence,-detecting at once its basic goodness and vileness, its compositeness! In this subtle, spiritual analysis of men and women, as we see them and live with them; in this power of detecting the enduring passions and desires, the strengths, the weaknesses, and the deceits of the race, from under the mask of ordinary worldly and town life, making a dandy or a dancing-girl as real, as 'moving delicate and full of life,' as the most heroic incarnations of good and evil; in this vitality and yet lightness of handling, doing it once and for ever, and never a touch too little or too much,— in all these respects he stood and stands alone and matchless. He had a crystalline translucency of thought and language; there was no mistaking or missing his meaning. It was like the finest etching, done with a needle and bitten in with the best aquafortis,—the manière incisive to perfection; while, when needed, he could rise to the full diapason of passion and lofty declamation: and this was not the less striking from being rare and brief, like a flash of close lightning with its thunder quick and short.

Besides his wit, his quiet, scrupulous, and unerring eye, his proper satiric gifts, his amazing faculty of

making his men and women talk each in their own voice and tongue, so that you know them before they are named, Mr. Thackeray had, as the condition under which all these acted, a singularly truthful, strong, and roomy understanding. There was an immense quantity, not less than the finest quality of mind in everything he said. You felt this when with him and when you measured with your eye his enormous brain.

His greatest work, one of the great masterpieces of genius in our, or indeed in any language, without doubt, is Vanity Fair.

This set him at once and by a bound in the first rank of fiction. One returns again and again to it, with its freshness, its depth, and terrible truth and power, its easy yet exquisite characterisation, its living talk, its abounding wit and fun.

We remember how, at the dinner given to him many years ago here, the chairman (Lord Neaves), with equal felicity and truth, said that two of Mr. Thackeray's master powers were satire and sympathy, -for without both of them he would not have been all that he peculiarly was.

It should never be forgotten that his specific gift was creative satire,—not caricature, nor even sarcasm, nor sentiment, nor romance, nor even character as such, but the delicate satiric treatment of human nature in its most superficial aspects as well as in its inner depths, by a great-hearted, and tender and

genuine sympathy, unsparing, truthful, inevitable, but with love and the love of goodness and true loving-kindness over-arching and indeed animating it all. It was well said by Brimley, in his subtle and just estimate of our great author in his Essays, that he could not have painted 'Vanity Fair as he has, unless Eden had been shining in his inner eye.' It was this sense of an all-perfect good, of a strict goodness laid upon each one of us as an unescapable law, it was this glimpse into the Paradise, not lost, of the lovely and the pure, which quickened his fell insight into the vileness, the vanity, the shortcomings, the pitifulness of us all, of himself not less than of any son of time. But as we once heard him say, he was created with a sense of the ugly, of the odd, of the meanly false, the desperately wicked; he laid them bare them under all disguises he hunted to the death. And is not this something to have done? Something inestimable, though at times dreadful and sharp? It purges the soul by terror and pity.

This, with his truthfulness, his scorn of exaggeration in thought or word, and his wide, deep, living sympathy for the entire round of human wants and miseries, goes far to make his works in the best, because a practical sense, wholesome, moral, honest, and of 'good report.'

It is needless to enumerate his works. We not only all know and possess them,-they possess us;

for are not Becky Sharp, Colonel Newcome, Major Pendennis, the Little Sister and Jeames, the Mulligan, and the terrific Deuceace, more really existing and alive in our minds than many men and women we saw yesterday?

Mr. Thackeray had, we believe, all but if not entirely, finished a novel which was to appear in the Cornhill next spring. It will be a sad pleasure to read the last words of the great genius and artist to whom we owe so much of our best entertainment.

He had a genuine gift of drawing. The delicious Book of Snobs is poor without his own woodcuts; and he not only had the eye and the faculty of a draughtsman, he was one of the best of art critics. He had the true instinct and relish, and the nicety and directness, necessary for just as well as high criticism the white light of his intellect found its way into this as into every region of his work. We should not forget his verses,—he would have laughed if they had been called poems; but they have more imaginative vis, more daintiness of phrase, more true sensibility and sense, than much that is called so both by its authors and the public. We all know the abounding fun and drollery of his 'Battle of Limerick,' the sweet humour and rustic Irish loveliness of 'Peg of Limavaddy,' and the glorified cockneyism of 'Jacob Omnium's 'Oss.' 'The Ballad of Eliza Davis,' and the joys and woes of 'Pleaceman X,' we all know ;