They are flowerets of earth,

That are blooming in heaven, so fair! And the stately tree,

Spreading wide and free,

The sheaves that were ripened are there.

The tear-drop that trembled
In Pity's meek eye; and the prayer,

Faith of the purest,

Hope that was surest,

The love all-enduring are there.

And the loved, the beloved, Whose life made existence so fair!

The soft seraph voice

Bade the lowly rejoice,

Is heard in sweet harmony there.'

THACKERAY'S DEATH.

THIS

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 Macaulayhas been taken from us with an awful unexpectedHe 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.

ness.

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 fibrillæ ! 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