Martin Luther! thank God, you came to | pull that infernal, wicked, unnatural altar down, that cursed Paganism. Let people, solitary, worn out by sorrow, or oppressed by extreme remorse, retire to such places. Fly, and beat your breasts in caverns and wildernesses, O women, if you will, but be Magdalenes first. It is shameful that any young girl, with any vocation, however seemingly strong, should be allowed to bury herself in this small tomb of a few acres. Look at yonder nun, pretty, smiling, graceful, and young. What has God's world done to her, that she should run from it, or she done to the world, that she should avoid it? What call has she to give up all her duties and affections? and would she not be best serving God with a husband at her side and a child on her knee? "I came out of the place quite sick; and, looking before me, there, thank God, was the blue spire of Monkstown Church soaring up into the free sky, a river in front rolling away to the sea, liberty, sunshine, all sorts of glad life and motion round about; and I couldn't but thank Heaven for it, and the Being whose ser vice is freedom, and who has given us affections that we may use them, not smother and kill them, and a noble world to live in, that we may admire it and him who made it, not shrink from it, as though we dared not live there, but must turn our backs upon it and its bountiful provider." There was probably no time which Mr. Thackeray enjoyed more than the Mediterranean trip which he took in the autumn of 1844, and of which he has given an account in his work, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo. The Peninsular and Oriental Company arranged an excursion of two months, in which the excursionists should see all the principal cities on the shores of the Mediterranean. One day at his club the idea was suddenly suggested to him by a friend, that he should join in this excursion. He was assured that the directors of the company would make him the present of a berth. This settled the matter. "To break his outstanding engagements; to write letters to his amazed family, stating that they were not to expect him at dinner on Saturday fortnight, as he would be at Jerusalem on that day; to purchase | eighteen shirts and lay in a sea-stock of Russia ducks; and on the 26th of July the 'Lady Mary Wood' was sailing from Southampton with the subject of the present memoir, quite astonished to find himself one of the passengers on board. These important statements are made partly to convince some incredulous friends, who insist still that the writer never went abroad at all, and wrote the following pages out of pure fancy, in retirement at Putney, but mainly to give him an opportunity of thanking the di rectors of the company in question for a delightful excursion.' This book of travels gives some personal touches of much interest. When he visited Greece he almost owned himself sorry that he was not better up in his classics. "I am anxious to apologize for a want of enthusiasm in the classical line, and to excuse an ignorance which is of the most undesirable sort.' "I would rather have two hundred a year in Fleet-street, than be king of the Greeks, with Basileus 'written before my name round their beggarly coin. I make no manner of doubt that, King Otho, the very day he can get away unperceived, and get together the passage-money, will be off for dear old Deutschland, Fatherland, Beerland." The words were curiously fulfilled, though not in the way which Mr. Thackeray thought of. His poem on the "White Squall," which they encountered in the voyage-amid much which is not to our taste has an exquisite concluding stanza respecting his two daughters, showing that intense family love which existed in his home: 66 "And when, its force expended, Came blushing o'er the sea, I thought, as day was breaking, A prayer at home for me." Apropos to this, he gives a pleasant account of getting home letters at Cairo. "I saw a young Oxford man seize his dispatches, and slink off with several letters written in a light neat hand, and sedulously crossed, which any man could see, without looking farther, were the handiwork of Mary Ann, to whom he is attached. The lawyer received a bundle from his chambers, in which his clerk eased his mind regarding the state of might have witnessed. We were shown Snooks v. Rodgers, Smith abs. Tomkins, over the magnificent barbaric church; etc. The statesman had a packet of visited, of course, the grotto where the thick envelopes, decorated with that blessed Nativity is said to have taken profusion of sealing-wax in which official | place, and the rest of the idols set up for recklessness lavishes the resources of the worship by the clumsy legend. When country; and your humble servant got the visit was concluded the party going just one little, modest letter, containing to the Dead Sea filed off with their another written in pencil characters, armed attendants; each individual travvarying in size between one and two eller making as brave a show as he could, inches; but how much pleasanter to read and personally accoutred with warlike than my lord's dispatch or the clerk's swords and pistols. The picturesque account of Smith abs. Tomkins; yes, crowds, and the Arabs and the horsemen even than the Mary Ann correspondence. in the sunshine; the noble old convent Yes, my dear madam, you will under- and the gray-bearded priests with their stand me when I say that it was from feast; and the church and its pictures little Polly at home, with some confiden- and columns and incense; the wide tial news about a cat, and the last report brown hills spreading round the village, of her new doll." with the accidents of the road, flocks and shepherds, wells and funerals, and camel trains, have left on my mind a brilliant, romantic, and cheerful picture. But you, dear M, without visiting the place, have imagined one far finer; and Bethlehem, where the Holy Child was born, and the angels sang Glory to God in the highest, and peace and good-will on earth,' is the most sacred and beautiful spot in the earth to you.” Some notices of his rapid visit to the Holy Land are written with great ear nestness and feeling. The following testimony is valuable: "We brought with us one of the gentlemen of the mission, a Hebrew convert, the Rev. Mr. E- -; and lest I should be supposed to speak with disrespect of any of the converts of the Hebrew faith, let me mention this gentleman as the only one whom I had the fortune to meet on terms of intimacy. I never saw a man whose outward conduct was more touching, whose sincerity was more evident, and whose religious feeling seemed more deep, real, and reasonable." "We went to Bethlehem, too, and saw the apocryphal wonders there. Five miles' ride brings you from Jerusalem to it, over naked, barren hills; the aspect of which, however, grows more cheerful as you approach the famous village. Hard by was Rebecca's well: a dead body was lying there, and crowds of male and female mourners dancing and howling round it. Now and then a little troop of savage, scowling horsemen a shepherd driving his black sheep, his gun over his shoulder; a troop of camels, or of women with long blue robes and white veils, bearing pitchers, and staring at the strangers with their great solemn eyes; or a company of laborers, with their donkeys, bearing grain or grapes to the city, met us and enlivened the little ride. We were entertained by the Superior of the Greek Convent in a fine refectory, with ceremonies and hospitalities that pilgrims of the middle ages ; Mr. Brown's Letters to his Nephew are admirably written; some of them vividly recall the Spectator and Tatier, and are the best things of the kind since the Tatler and Spectator were written. In these pages he publicly described the London club life with which he was so familiar. But throughout Thackeray's writings there is an undoubted autobiographic view; and, if our limits permitted the attempt, it might be possible to exhibit both his internal and external history for many years. His school days, how often are they alluded to, from some of the earliest of his miscellanies to the final Roundabout Papers. Pendennis is a tolerably fair transcript of his college days and subsequent times. The scenery of Clavering, St. Mary, and Chatteris is, in effect, Ottery, St. Mary, and Exeter, near which his step-father rented a place at which he used to stay. His experiences in France are all turned to admirable account in the Adventures of Philip. He has given some interesting personal narratives of his adventures in America; for instance, a Mississippi Bubble. The first work in which Thackeray had full scope to exhibit his extraordi nary powers was Vanity Fair. It was one which took the world by storm. Then, when he was getting on for forty, he became famous, and began to be wealthy. It can hardly be said that before this the public had treated a great author with neglect. Thackeray flowered late; his genius required to be mellowed by time. He had not arrived at full intellectual maturity before his first large work was issued.. When his genius was fully exhibited it was fully recognized. Mr. Thackeray also made some attempts in poetry and art. He was hardly, in any high sense of the word, a poet, nor was poetry an object to which he in any marked degree devoted himself, nor to which he referred much of his thought, study, and observation. "But," as Mr. Hannay fairly says, "inside his fine, sagacious, common-sense under standing there was, so to speak, a pool of poetry, like the impluvium in the hall of a Roman house, which gave an air of coolness and freshness and nature to the solid marble columns and tesselated floor." What is true of his poetry is also, in a high degree, true of his art. To be a great artist was his never-realized ambition. To the last he was always busy with his crayons. He would probably have much preferred being a great artist to being a great author. He attempted to illustrate some of his own works, but his success was not such as to encourage him to continue the experi ment. But in one direction his artistic studies were eminently successful: I mean his vignettes — those in which the initial letters of his chapters were so curiously intertwined. They frequently sum up the whole comedy of the chapter, and give evidence of admirable wit and originality. Let us here add that he followed the prevailing fashion of is suing Christmas books: Our Street, Rebecca and Rowena, Dr. Birch and his Young Friends, The Kickleburys on the Rhine. When the Times attacked the last of these in magniloquent language, he retaliated by an essay on Thunder and Small Beer. In 1851 the happy idea occurred to Mr. Thackeray of turning lecturer. The subject he selected was the "English Humorists" and with its history and literature he was most thoroughly at home. The lectures proved a mine of wealth, being most successful in London and the country, and he passed over to America to deliver them there. "At Washington Mr. Irving came to a lecture given by the writer, which Mr. Fillmore and General Pierce, the President and President elect, were also kind enough to attend together." "Once in America à clever and candid woman said to me, at the close of a dinner, during which I had been sitting beside her, 'I was told I should not like you, and I don't!' 'Well, ma'am,' said I, in a tone of the most unfeigned simplicity, 'I don't care.'" In 1856 Mr. Thackeray again made a profitable visit to America, and delivered his lectures on the "Four Georges." I think that what he says of George III. is, for pathos and eloquence, perhaps the most masterly of what he has written. "The heart of England still beats kindly for George III.," he has written elsewhere, and we are glad that Thackeray could feel so for him and thus eloquently speak: "All the world knows the story of his malady: all history presents no sadder figure than that of the old man, blind and deprived of reason, wandering through the rooms of his palace, addressing imaginary parliaments, reviewing fancied troops, holding ghostly courts. I have seen his picture as it was taken at this time, hanging in the apartment of his daughter, the Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, amidst books and Windsor furniture, and a hundred fond reminiscences of her English home. The poor old father is represented in a purple gown, his snowy beard falling over his breast, the star of his famous order still idly shining on it. He was not only sightless: he became utterly deaf. All light, all reason, all sound of human voices, all the pleasures of this world of God, were taken from him. Some slight lucid moments he had; in one of which the queen, desiring to see him, entered the room and found him singing a hymn and accompanying himself at the harpsichord. When he had finished he knelt down and prayed aloud for her, and then for his family, and then for the nation, concluding with a prayer for himself, that it might please God to avert his heavy calamity from him, but if not, to give him resignation to submit. He . then burst into tears, and his reason again fled. "Vex not his ghost! Oh! let him pass: he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world fore she had ever seen him she dedicated to him that remarkable story which made her reputation. "Last, not least, an interview with Mr. Thackeray. He made a morning call and sat above two hours. The giant sat before me. I was moved to speak to him of some of his shortcomings (literary, of course): one by one the faults came into my head, and one by one I brought them out and sought some explanation or defence. The "What preacher need moralize on this story? What words save the simplest are requisite to tell it? It is too terrible for tears. The thought of such a misery strikes us down in submission before the Ruler of kings and men, the Monarch Supreme over empires and republics, the inscrutable Dispenser of life, death, happiness, victory. O brothers,' I said to those who heard me first in America--excuses were often more than the crime O brothers, speaking the same dear itself. The matter ended in decent ammother tongue-O comrades, enemies ity." "All you say of Mr. Thackeray no more, let us take a mournful hand is most graphic and characteristic. He together as we stand by this royal corpse, stirs in me both sorrow and anger. Why and call a truce to battle! Low he lies should he lead so harassing a life? Why to whom the proudest used to kneel should his mocking tongue so perversely once, and who was cast lower than the deny the better feelings of his better poorest: dead, whom millions prayed moods?" "I came here in order to be for in vain. Driven off his throne; buf- in time for Thackeray's second lecture. feted by rude hands; with his children This, as you may suppose, was a genuin revolt; the darling of his old age ine treat to me, and I was glad not to killed before him untimely, our Lear miss it. The audience was said to be hangs over her breathless lips, and cries the cream of London society, and it "Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little." looked so. I did not at all expect the great lecturer would know me or notice me under these circumstances, with adin rows before him; but he met me as I miring duchesses and countesses seated entered, shook hands, took me to his mother, whom I had not before seen, and introduced me. He is a great and strange man. There is quite a furor for his lectures." "I am not going to praise either Mr. Thackeray or his book. I have read, enjoyed, been interested, and after all feel as much woe and sorrow as gratitude and admiration. What relent less dissection of diseased subjects!" "His form, his penetration, his pithy simplicity, his eloquence - his manly, sonorous eloquence-command entire admiration. Against his errors I protest. That Thackeray was wrong in his way of treating Fielding's character, my conscience told me. After reading that lecture, I felt that he was wrong, dangerously wrong. Had Thackeray owned a son, grown or growing up, and a son brilliant but reckless, would he have spoken in that light way of courses that led to disgrace and the grave? He speaks of it all as if he theorized; as if he had never been called on in the course of his life to witness the actual consequences of such failings; as if he had never stood by and seen the issue, the "Hush, strife and quarrel, over the solemn grave! Sound, trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, dark curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy.'" Surely this is real pathos and eloquence. These lectures have a certain historical value of their own. Mr. Thackeray, indeed, seriously contemplated an important historical work which he never lived to commence. After his return from his second American expedition, he offered himself as a candidate to represent Oxford, and lost his election by a very small majority. His speech, after the declaration of the poll, was characteristic: "I will retire and take my place with my pen and ink at my desk, and leave to Mr. Cardwell a business which I am sure he understands better than I do." In the life of Charlotte Brontë we find some interesting notices of Mr. Thackeray by that distinguished writer, evidencing great accuracy and impartiality. To the last Thackeray possessed a kind of fascination over her miud. Be 66 final result of it all. I believe, if only once the prospects of a. promising life, blasted on the outset by wild ways, had passed close under his eyes, he never could have spoken with such levity of what led to its piteous destruction." Miss Brontë, a lenient judge, and one most unlikely to take too severe a view, has here laid her finger on an obvious blot that disfigures many of Mr. Thackeray's writings. He is fond of representing young men as "sowing their wild oats," and then becoming useful and respectable members of society. But though they have done sowing, have they done reaping? Then, some wild oats have frequently a habit of reappearing throughout life, and a bitter harvest it is. Men frequently pass from the sins of youth to the sins of mature life, and imagine that they have lost their vices when they have only changed them. The ethical system of Mr. Thackeray, so far as he develops it in his works, appears to be inaccurately founded, and, when corrected by knowledge drawn from the highest of all sources, liable to be diverted to a pernicious use. The Newcomes, Esmond, the Virginians, had added to his wealth and reputation. "Since my return from America," he writes, "I have hardly been in London at all, and, when here, in such a skurry of business and pleasure as never to call a day my own, scarcely." His conversation was often most interesting and instructive. "We remember in particular," writes Mr. Hannay, "one evening after a dinner-party at his house, a fancy picture which he drew of Shaks peare during his last years at Stratford, sitting out in the summer afternoon watching the people." "Latterly," says the same writer, "he had built himself a handsome house in Kensington, to which he moved from Onslow Square, Brompton-his residence after leaving Young-street, where he wrote Vanity Fair. It is on the west side of the palace gardens, of red brick and stone facings, built from a design drawn by himself." In these days he projected and brought out the Cornhill Magazine, which proved a brilliant success. For some time he edited it; .but by-and-by he found reason to complain that the editorial cushion was full of thorns, and relinquished the management, still writing much for it, and carefully elaborating a new story, which he believed would be among the best things he had ever written. In the midst of this life of busy schemes and crowded activity he was suddenly stricken down. Last Christmas Eve a rumor, almost incredulously received, prevailed through London that Thackeray was dead. The next morning the Times and other papers confirmed the tidings. He appears to have died instantaneously, during the nighttime, from effusion on the brain. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. More than fifteen hundred persons, very many of them eminent in science, literature, and art, attended the funeral. As soon as might be, some notices, brief, but full of pathos and interest, appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, of which, as we have said, he was the projector, and for long the presiding chief. Very fittingly Mr. Dickens-who has so often been named in connection or in contrast with this other great contemporary master of fiction-wrote the first paper in the number, "In Memoriam.” Mr. Dickens notices, as every other writer has done, the remarkable contrast which existed between Mr. Thackeray's biting satire-satire which, in his earliest works at least, was pushed to an extreme length-and his deep affectionate nature and his overflowing tenderness of heart. Mr. Dickens recalls the lines in which Thackeray made his own pen speak thus in reference to him who wielded it: "I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain; The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain; The idle word that he'd wish back again." He also speaks of his delight in children. There was a great charm in Thackeray's most genuine and unaffected love for little children. He loved to hold them by his knee, and rest his hand on their dark or golden hair. "He had a particular delight in boys," says Mr. Dickens, "and an excellent way with them. I remember his once asking me, with fantastic gravity, when he had been to Eton, where my eldest son whether I felt as he did in regard of never seeing a boy without wanting instantly to give him a sovereign. thought of this when I looked down into his grave, for I looked down into was; |