a real woman, the world of Castlewood, through which she walks a magnificent shadow, is admirably depicted. The vague background of rebellion and jesuitry gives an air of added gaiety and peace to the gay or tranquil inhabitants. My Lord Castlewood himself is one of those warm-hearted, foolish, shiftless gentlemen whom Thackeray knew so well how to draw. He is a Rawdon Crawley, more happily mated, and when the crisis of his destiny arrives he bears himself, as did Rawdon, like a man. Nothing could be better than his conduct of the duel with Lord Mohun, a duel most artfully composed from the records of the time. Nor is the son, Francis the Younger, unworthy his brave, spendthrift, debonair father. Though he is as vain as his sister, his vanity is tempered by an amiable disposition. "I know my place," he tells Esmond. "I'm not proud; I am simply Francis James, Viscount Castlewood in the peerage of Ireland." He is not clever, but he has what the old Dowager calls the bel air. Mr Steele hits him off in a line. "The lad looks good things," says he, "and his laugh lights up a conversation as much as ten repartees from Mr Congreve." And while the principal actors in the drama are well understood and well drawn, Esmond is singularly free from those stockcharacters with which few novelists can dispense. True, the jesuit Holt, with his strange comings and goings, his secret hiding-places, and his inaccurate information, is a type rather than a man. True, also, the old Marchioness, the wicked Dowager of Chelsey, is but Miss

Crawley artfully disguised, and more thickly coated with paint. But, when all deductions are made, Thackeray has achieved a success granted to few novelists besides Sir Walter Scott: he has peopled an unreal world with real men and women, for though the age is Anne's, Esmond and my Lady and Frank Castlewood are human enough to have lived at any time and under any sky.

But it is not merely for its characters that we esteem Esmond, nor for its many passages of dignified, even elevated, prose. The book will ever be memorable also for one or two scenes of haunting beauty, or dramatic intensity. Who can ever forget Esmond's visit to Walcote after his return from Vigo? It is in Winchester Cathedral that he sees my Lady Castlewood and Frank after his estrangement, bringing back with him, in Tom Tusher's phrase, "Gaditanian laurels." "And Harry's coming home to supper. Huzzay! huzzay!" cries my lord. “Mother, I shall run home and bid Beatrix put her ribands on. Beatrix is a maid of honour, Henry. Such a fine set-up minx!" The passage expresses the sentiment, not the sentimentality, of home-coming, without a word too much, without a note falsely struck. Still better is the last chapter of all, wherein Esmond and the young lord pursue the Prince to Castlewood. These dozen pages are, I think, Thackeray's highest achievement. The three men are perfectly realised-Esmond dignified and austere, as becomes the head of the house; Frank chivalrous and

impulsive, like the sound-hearted boy he is; and his Majesty, when once his rage is mastered, every inch a king. "Eh, bien, Vicomte," says the young Prince, who was a boy, and a French boy, "il ne nous reste qu'un chose à faire: embrassons nous." It is a brave picture, bravely painted, without a stroke awry, without a superfluous touch.

Since Esmond many hundreds (or is it thousands ?) of historical novels have been published; yet Esmond's supremacy is still unchallenged. The author's own opinion of the book changed with his temper. One day he finds it "clever, but also stupid, and no mistake"; another, he wishes "the new novel was not so grand and melancholy"; and when he contemplated it in all the bravery of its three volumes, “Esmond,” he wrote, "looks very stately and handsome in print, and bore as he is, I think he will do me credit." Thackeray's prediction has been fulfilled. Esmond did him infinite credit, and came nearest to being "the complete good book" which, said he, it was a shame the author didn't write.

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CHAPTER VII.

THE NEWCOMES-A PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION.

THE NEWCOMES1 was published to a chorus of applause. The Press, of whatever temper and complexion, received it in respectful admiration. "This is Mr Thackeray's masterpiece," said the old-fashioned Quarterly, "as it is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of English fiction." The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the brand-new "organ" of the pre-Raphaelites, was no less emphatic, declaring The Newcomes "the masterpiece of all novel-writing," and numbering its author "among the great naturalists of all time." Since 1855 the word "naturalist" has borne many a heavy burden. It has supported the dullest researches of M. Zola and his followers. It has been inscribed upon the banner of those who believe that nothing is true save the abnormal, and properly enough it has fallen into disrepute. in the mouth of the pre-Raphaelites it was a term of

But

1 The Newcomes: Memoirs of a most respectable Family, edited by Arthur Pendennis, Esq. : published in twenty-four monthly numbers from October 1853 to August 1855.

adulation.

They believed that all nature should be as meticulously observed and as carefully described as the foregrounds of their own works, and in calling Thackeray a "naturalist," they did but share with him their own glory. Nor was the term wholly misapplied. In a sense, completely opposite to that which it has since attained, it fits Thackeray closely enough. So far as he looked upon the common aspects of life, so far as he did not travel beyond his own experience, Thackeray was a true naturalist.

The reader will vainly seek hairbreadth escapes or curiosities of vice in the pages of The Newcomes, which is so close to nature as to contain nothing abnormal. It was this perfect correspondence with the average knowledge of life which partly explains the book's popularity. But there is another reason why

The Newcomes should have found favour in the world's eye. It seemed Mr Thackeray's masterpiece, because it was most characteristic of his talent and prejudices. It was, so to say, Pendennis carried to a higher power, and it was acceptable to all those who thought that Esmond was a rude interruption to the author's real work. In other words, the thick-and-thin admirers of Thackeray found in The Newcomes precisely what they expected, and found it in fuller measure. Here was the same easy style of writing which distinguished Vanity Fair and Pendennis, the same easy treatment of great personages, the same liberal mixture of over-sweet honey and too bitter gall. But in half a century the un