Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20.djvu/260

 252 Reviews and Literary Notices. [August, REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES. Early and Late Papers, hitherto uncollected. By WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. Boston : Ticknor and Fields. IT appears to us tlat the graceful art of Thackeray was never more happily em- ployed than in the first paper of this series. The " Memorials of Gormandizing " fs a record of thrilling interest, and every good dinner described has the effect upon the reader of a felicitous drama. He goes from course to course, as from act to act of the play ; he is agonized with suspense con- cerning the fate of the dishes, as if they were so many heroes and heroines ; if the steak is not justly cooked, it shall give him almost as great heart-break as a dis- appointment of lovers ; when all is fortu- nately ended, he takes a long breath, as when the curtain falls upon the picture of the united young people, the relenting uncle, and the baffled villain. As good as a novel ? There are mighty few novels that have so much of life and human nature in them as that simple and affecting history, given in this book, of a dinner at the Cafe de Foy, in Paris. But they make one hungry with an inappeasable appetite, these " Memorials of Gormandizing," bringing to mind all the beautiful dinners eaten in Latin countries, and filling the heart with longing for the hotels that look out on the Louvre at Paris, the Villa Reale at Naples,* the Venetian sunsets, the Arno at Florence, and even for the railway restaurants which so en- chantingly diversify the flat, monotonous, and desolate Flemish landscape. We travel with Mr. Titmarsh to Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp, through the latter region, and we enjoy every one of those " Roadside Sketches," so delicate, so unerr- ing, and so suggestive. Thackeray is a de- lightful traveller ; for he, who can talk more wisely of old clothes than most preachers of eternity, gets out of the nothings that tourists see the very life and spirit of a country. Here is something also about modern art and pictures in England and France, which comes as near not at all bor- ing as anything of that nature can ; but we find the account of " Dickens in France " so much more attractive, that we shall al- ways read it by preference hereafter. For this is a book to be read many times by those loving to feel the conscious felicity of a writer who knows that every sentence shall happily express his mind, and succeed in winning the reader to the next. The security is tacit in the earlier papers here reprinted ; in the later ones it is more de- clared, and becomes somewhat careless, though it can never beget slovenliness. It appears to this great master that what he does so easily can scarcely be worth doing, and he mocks his own facility. The spirit of the book is the same throughout. It is not different from that of Thackeray's other books, and it is that of a man too sensible of his own love of the advantages he enjoys from the existing state of things ever to assail, with any great earnestness of purpose, the errors and ab- surdities of the world, who trusted, for example, in one of his essays, never to be guilty of speaking harshly either of the South or North of America, since friends in both sections had offered him equally good claret. He is forever first in his art ; and if we do not expect too much from him, he gives us so much that we must rejoice over every line of his preserved for our perusal.

is no great while since Miss Peck proved to her own satisfaction her claim to what Mr. Morse would style the “maternity” of “Nothing to Wear,” and now hardly has Judge Holmes of Missouri determined that the paternity of Shakespeare is due to Bacon, when the friends of Mr. Ball of New Jersey spring another trouble upon mankind by declaring him the author of Mrs. Akers’s very graceful and touching poem, “Rock me to Sleep, Mother,” which we all know by heart. In the present pamphlet they give what evidence they can in Mr. Ball’s behalf, and, to tell the truth, it is not much. It appears from this and other sources that Mr. Ball is a person of independent property, and a member of the New