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Rh which Thackeray in this book called the Back Kitchen, and it is a picture filled with striking figures. In some of these, notably in that of Foker, Thackeray went, it is supposed, very close to actual life for his material, and in that particular case with a most agreeable result. As for the two umbra of the marquis of Steyne, it is difficult to believe that they were intended as caricatures from two well-known persons. If they were, for once Thackeray's hand forgot its cunning. Here, as in Vanity Fair, the heroism has been found a little insipid; and there may be good ground for finding Laura Pendennis dull, though she has a spirit of her own. In later books she becomes, what Thackeray's people very seldom are, a tiresome as well as an uninviting person. Costigan is unique, and so is Major Pendennis, a type which, allowing for differences of period and manners, will exist as long as society does, and which has been seized and depicted by Thackeray as by no other novelist. His two encounters, from both of which he comes out victorious, one with Costigan in the first, the other with Morgan in the second volume, are admirable touches of genius. In opposition to the worldliness of the major, with which Pendennis does not escape being tainted, we have Warrington, whose nobility of nature has come unscathed through a severe trial, and who, a thorough gentleman if a rough one, is really the guardian of Pendennis's career. There is, it should be noted, a characteristic and acknowledged confusion in the plot of Pendennis, which will not spoil any intelligent reader's pleasure.

Probably most readers of The Newcomes (1854) to whom the book is mentioned think first of the grand, chivalrous, and simple figure of Colonel Newcome, who stands out in the relief of almost ideal beauty of character against the crowd of more or less imperfect and more or less base personages who move through the novel. At the same time, to say, as has been said, that this book "is full of satire from the first to the last page" is to convey an impression which is by no means just. There is plenty of kindliness in the treatment of the young men who, like Clive Newcome himself and Lord Kew, possess no very shining virtue beyond that of being honourable gentlemen; in the character of J. J. Ridley there is much tenderness and pathos; and no one can help liking the Bohemian F. B., and looking tolerantly on his failings. It may be that both the fiendish temper of Mrs Mackenzie and the sufferings she inflicts on the Colonel are too closely insisted on; but it must be remembered that this heightens the singular pathos of the closing scenes of the Colonel's life. It has seemed convenient to take The Newcomes after Pendennis, because Pendennis and his wife reappear in this book as in the Adventures of Philip; but Esmond (1852) was written and published before The Newcomes. To some students Esmond seems and will seem Thackeray's capital work. It has not been rivalled, and only a few times approached by Mr Besant, as a romance reproducing with unfailing interest and accuracy the figures, manners, and phrases of a past time, and it is full of beautiful touches of character. But Beatrix, upon whom so much hinges, is an unpleasing character, although one understands fully why men were captivated by her insolent beauty and brilliancy; and there is some truth in Thackeray's own saying, that "Esmond was a prig." Apart from this, the story is, like the illusion of a past time in the narrative, so complete in all its details, so harmoniously worked out, that there is little room for criticism. As to Esmond's marriage with the lady whom he has served and loved as a boy, that is a matter for individual judgment. Beatrix, it has been indicated above, is wonderfully drawn; and not the least wonderful thing about her is her reappearance as the jaded, battered, worldly, not altogether unkindly, Baroness in The Virginians. It was just what Beatrix must have come to, and the degradation is handled with the lightest and finest touch.

In 1851 Thackeray had written The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, delivered as a series of lectures at Willis's Rooms in the same year, and re-delivered in the United States in 1852 and 1853, as was afterwards the series called The Four Georges. Both sets were written for the purposes of lecturing. In 1857 Thackeray stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for Oxford against Mr Cardwell, and in the same year appeared the first number of The Virginians, a sequel to Esmond. This is a most unequal work, inferior, as sequels are apt to be, to Esmond as an historical romance, less compact and coherent, prone to divagation and desultoriness, yet charming enough in its lifelikeness, in the wit and wisdom of its reflexions, and, as has been said, in its portrait of Beatrix grown old. The last number of The Virginians came out in 1859, and in the same year Thackeray undertook the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine. This was a task which, as readers of his Roundabout paper "Thorns in the Cushion" will remember, the kindliness and sensitiveness of his disposition made irksome to him, and he resigned the editorship in April 1862, though he continued to write for the magazine until he died. In the Cornhill appeared from his pen Lovel the Widower, previously written, with different names for some of the personages, in dramatic form; The Adventures of Philip; the Roundabout Papers; and the story, unhappily never finished, called Denis Duval. Lovel the Widower, changed from the dramatic to the narrative form, remains a piece of high comedy in which the characters are indicated rather than fully worked out, with a bold and practised touch. It contains some references to Thackeray's early and unfortunate newspaper speculations, and it was provided by the author with illustrations which as in others of his books have a value which is entirely their own in furnishing, as it were, a far completer commentary on the letterpress than could have been given by any draughtsman, however perspicacious and finished, who approached the pictorial representation of the characters from the outside. To the general statement thus indicated an exception should be made in the case of Doyle's illustrations to The Newcomes and to Rebecca and Rowena. On the other hand, not even Doyle could have matched the fun and spirit of Thackeray's own illustrations to another burlesque story, one of his best, The Rose and the Ring. The Roundabout Papers, a small storehouse of some of Thackeray's best qualities as an essayist, came out in the Cornhill Magazine simultaneously with Lovel the Widower and with The Adventures of Philip. Among them is one differing in form from the rest, called The Notch on the Axe—a Story à la Mode. It is an almost perfect specimen of the author's genius for burlesque story-telling; but it contains an odd instance, which a careful reader will not fail to discover, of the odd habit of inaccuracy of which Thackeray himself was conscious. The Adventures of Philip is, as has been before said, in the nature of a sequel to or a completion of A Shabby Genteel Story. As with the other direct sequel, it is a work of great inequality. It contains scenes of humour, pathos, satire, which rank with Thackeray's best work; some old friends from others of the novels make brief but pleasant reappearances in its pages; there are fine sketches of journalistic, artistic, and diplomatic life, and the scene from the last-named in Paris is inimitable. The Little Sister is altogether delightful; the Twysden family are terribly true and vastly diverting; the minor characters, among whom old Ridley, J. J.'s father, should be mentioned, are wonder fully hit off; nor did Thackeray ever write a better scene than that of the quarrel between Bunch, Baynes, and M'Whirter in the Paris pension. Philip himself is