it is possible for Mr. Disraeli, ere he die, to be a strong, if not a popular minister. He comes of a long-lived family, his father and grandfather retaining their faculties to extreme old age. He is not much over fifty. Perchance, after the expiration of another quarter of a century, he may be an octogenarian premier and the idol of the nation. For him to rise from his present position to such an eminence, would be a less step than the one already made from the hustings of High Wycombe to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. Another crisis, similar to that of the CornLaws, may arise, and fierce denunciations may be required against another Sir Robert Peel; under such circumstances, Mr. Disraeli's peculiar faculty-his genius-will be needed, and he will not fail to use it. It is even just upon the cards that he may grow to be respected by the great body of the British people. As it is, he is not in respect of political versatility a whit blacker than half the conspicuous and admired statesmen of the present century. Indeed, by the side of some, who stand well enough in the eyes of the world, he is a pattern of probity and rectitude. At present he is (although twice a minister) a political adventurer." But the time may come, when the removal of corrupting influence from the respectable members of our constituencies will infuse a higher morality into the masses of electors in our boroughs and counties, and will enable the doctor who now sells his vote to his best patient, the lawyer who now sells his vote to his best client, and the entire British public, who now harangue with edifying horror against bribery but wallow in corruption-will enable all these, satisfied and at ease with themselves, and rendered charitable by a sense of individual honour, to view with greater leniency the failings and sins of "political adventurers,"

CHAPTER XIII.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.

"WHICH is your favourite-Thackeray or Dickens ?" is the ordinary question with which strangers, who are thrown together in a party and are casting about for a topic advance to a conversation on matters literary. To ask your friend whether he prefers grapes to olives, or curries to lemon ices, would be quite as much in accordance with common sense. Indeed the two great novelists of the day are so diametrically opposed, that it is impossible to compare them, and pass judgment on them as we could on any of the two same species. Winter and summer, an opera-dancer and an athlete, a steam locomotive and a musical snuff-box, are not more unlike than are these two writers, the monthly numbers of whose works bear no more mutual resemblance than do the sheets of fresh green and yellow sear in which they are enclosed. The writer of past times with whom the author of "Pendennis" is usually compared, is Fielding, and unquestionably the style, tone, and object of Thackeray's writings justify the comparison, although in no point do they lay him open to the charge of being an imitator of the author of "Tom Jones." That Thackeray himself feels that he in this generation occupies the place in literature which Fielding held more than a century ago, is evidenced by several passages in his writings, besides the memorable preface to "Pendennis," where he confesses that a timid regard for the prejudices of a society which "will not tolerate the Natural in our Art" restrained him from speaking as boldly as he desired, and where he laments that since the

author of "Tom Jones" was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man. There is rife amongst us a spirit of pedantry (not less contemptible than that which for generations declared any Latin poem superior to the best English one) which will not admit the possibility of any living author being worthy of comparison with the old novelists; but no one capable of appreciating the wonderful genius of Fielding will think dishonour done to it by him who claims for Thackeray an equally exalted position, and no one but a malignant and an imbecile will charge Thackeray with presumption in recognizing the points of similarity between himself and his great forerunner. Still, strong as the resemblance is Thackeray is other than Fielding; he has a less genial temper, perhaps a less subtle humour than the creator of Miss Bridget Alworthy and Partridge, and at times he writes with a cold bitterness and a gloomy misanthropy which the most savage excesses of Swift do not surpass, but throughout his works there are discernible a deep, lively, unvarying love of the good and beautiful, an earnestness of purpose, and the noblest kind of religious fervour, that one in vain looks for in "Tom Jones" and "Amelia."

William Makepeace Thackeray sprang, like all the rest of us, from a good old stock, the Thackeray family being of considerable antiquity and influence. His grandfather was the Rev. Richard Thackeray, of Hadley, Middlesex; and his father had a lucrative post in the civil service of the East India Company. The author was born in Calcutta, in 1811, and was sent to England to be educated, after he had passed the first years of his childhood under an oriental sun. On his way from India to the remote European island, to which that vast continent is attached, the vessel stopped at a certain barren, rocky isle, and the child, under the guardianship of his black servant, paid that visit

to the great Napoleon's residence which he so humourously described in one of his late lectures on "The Georges."

In due time the boy was placed in the Charterhouse School-the school in which Steele and Addison, Tupper and Reynolds (the author of "The Mysteries of London,”) were birched into scholarship, and which has been celebrated in several of Thackeray's writings. Little Rawdon Crawley, Pendennis, and Clive Newcome were all educated at the Charterhouse. It was as a poor brother of the Charterhouse that the dear old Colonel Newcome bade farewell to this sad world; and in an almost countless number of allusions, the author declares his affection for "Smiffle." At an early period of life the boy was an orphan, his father leaving him, at his death, a handsome provision. On quitting school, he went to Cambridge, where his brief academic career terminated without his obtaining a degree. On coming of age, he obtained possession of his patrimony, amounting to not less than £20,000; but of this ample fortune, partly by his own youthful imprudences, and principally by the rascality of those whom he trusted, he lost every penny by the time he had completed his twenty-third year. A cruel commencement this to life, and calculated utterly to undo any but a very good or a very insignificant nature!

His early ambition, like Clive's, was to be an artist; and for some time he studied with industry at Rome and in the best Continental schools. But after giving it a fair trial, he relinquished the use of the brush and the pencil as a means of livelihood, and with a bold heart flung himself upon literature. For many years he found it a thankless vocation, crowded with successful blockheads, and disfigured by neglected merit. He went on the "Times" when Barnes was its editor; and he did well and uprightly his work as "a gentleman of the press." But it was in

"Fraser's Magazine" and "Punch," that he gained first the plaudits of his profession, and then of the public.

In 1841, "The Hoggarty Diamond" was published in "Fraser," after having been declined by a magazine to which it had been offered. Even in that excellent and widely-circulated serial it attracted but little attention; a few readers, indeed, detected in "Mr. Titmarsh" a writer of no common power; and one of them, the amiable John Sterling, to whose name Carlyle's pen has secured a long immunity from oblivion, was so struck with its. excellence, that he prophesied the future celebrity of its author. But "Mr. Titmarsh's" toil was not destined to meet with a quick return of praise; it was ordained that he was to experience, with what patience he could muster, the contumely of neglect, and for long years to work uncheered by the applause he merited, and unsustained by the more substantial rewards his genius and industry were entitled to, while he saw the worth of luckier aspirants acknowledged without delay, and--harder yet, the worthlessness of paper-blotting buffoons bearing away the bell. To us, at this day, contemplating that gem of art, "The Hoggarty Diamond," its redundant wealth of humour, its simple pathos, and its thousand quaint beauties of fancy and expression, it is almost incredible that fairly intelligent and polite people could be found to admire the trash of Theodore Hook's stories, and to turn coldly away from the delicate satire and generous sentiment with which the grotesque adventures of the city clerk were narrated. Yet so it was; and the fact may well be, as it has already often been, fruitful in encouragement and instruction to young authors who are impatient of obscurity, and are maddened by the capricious coquetries of success.

The "Paris Sketch Book," the "Irish Sketch Book," the Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo," the "Second Funeral of Napoleon," and "Chronicle of the Drum," "The