Nor did the trouble end here. Some ten years later a set of young Irishmen determined that Thackeray had made a deliberate attempt to ruin their distinguished countrywoman; and in revenge they deputed a young gentleman to take lodgings opposite the novelist's house, and await an opportunity of chastising him. But Thackeray carried the war into the enemy's camp: he called upon the enraged Irishman, told him the true history of the wicked Catherine Hayes, and sent him back to Ireland without a thought of revenge in his head. The anecdote is characteristic of either side, and is the pleasantest incident in the career, real or imagined, of Catherine Hayes.

Burlesque is bastard brother to irony, and if The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan are burlesque at its maddest, the two methods are agreeably blended in The Yellowplush Papers, which also first sparkled in the pages of Fraser's. Now, when Jeames is a pseudonym for the author, he is nothing more than an excuse for bad spelling. (In his inception he was called Charles, but it was as Jeames that he rose to grandeur, and should be remembered). His views are the views not of a flunkey, but of Thackeray himself. His Letters to the Literati, for instance, throw no light upon his character, they mark no point in his progress. They do but

1 This suggestion to horsewhip Thackeray was made after a reference to Catherine Hayes in Pendennis; but the real offence was committed in the earlier story, and therefore it is most properly discussed here. See Morning Chronicle, April 12, 1850, Capers and Anchovies, a piece of controversy in Thackeray's best manner.

assail the " "Honrabble Barnet" in terms of deeper contempt than Thackeray would have used, had he written in his own name and with his own pen. We may therefore dismiss all those essays in which the name of Yellowplush is usurped, and consider only such pages as throw the light of autobiography upon the ingenious flunkey.

Jeames, indeed, is an engaging figure, and no sooner does he step upon the stage than he wins our sympathy. For he, too, is painted in the colours of irony, and owes something of his character to the Dean of St Patrick's. It has been said that he was drawn, as he appeared in Buckley Square, after Mr Foster, the gentleman who for many years contributed the Fashionable Intelligence to The Morning Post. But this is incredible: from the first day that he encountered Mr Altamont, he has the makings of a genuine flunkey, whom you could not match outside the famous Directions to Servants. At the outset he adopted the right attitude of snobbery towards his own kind "them poor disrepattable creatures" he loftily calls them. No sooner does he take service with Mr Deuceace than he reveals a sound knowledge of his craft. "When you carry up a dish of meat,”—thus the footman is enjoined by Swift,—“dip your fingers in the sauce, or lick it with your tongue, to try whether it be good, and fit for your master's table." And Jeames had already turned this philosophy into practice. "There wasn't a bottle of wine," says he,

"that we didn't get a glass out of, nor a pound of sugar that we didn't have some lumps of it." "We had keys to all the cubbards—we pipped into all the letters that kem and went-we pored over all the billfiles-we'd the best pickens out of the dinners, the livvers of the fowls, the forcemit balls out of the soup, the egs from the sallit." All this they had as their rights, for "a suvvant's purquisits is as sacred as the laws of Hengland."

But if Jeames knew his rights, he knew also his master's character. The Honrabble Halgernon was a gambler and a swindler-that his servant saw; but he recognised that rank and birth can warrant the last enormity. Yellowplush, then, is already a true footman in Miss Shum's Husband, that story of a taboo, which may best be described as a modern Cupid and Psyche, and he is a still finer expert in Mr Deuceace's Amours. But it is not until he signs himself Fitz James de la Pluche1 that he does perfect justice to his talents. At last he was in the situation which the author was best pleased to depict. He was rising from one world to another, he was deserting the servants'hall for the drawing-room, and exchanging the fidelity

1 The earlier series of Yellowplush Papers was printed in Fraser's Magazine in 1837-38, and republished in the Comic Tales and Sketches of 1841. The Diary of C. Feames de la Pluche did not appear in Punch until 1845-46, and having been published by Appleton of New York in 1853, first found its way into a volume, on this side the Atlantic, in the Library Edition of 1869. But since the later is a development of the earlier work, they are considered together in this place.

of Mary Ann for the sly contempt of Lady Angelina. He had become as fierce a gambler as Mr Deuceace himself; but it was not the cards that tempted him— it was the railroads of England; and he played with such brilliant luck that before long he was "a landed propriator-a Deppaty Leftnant-a Capting." Under the auspices of his friend, Lord Bareacres, he is presented at Court, wearing upon his handsome brow the Halbert 'At-"an 'at which is dear to the memory of hevery Brittn; an 'at which was invented by my Feald Marshle, and adord Prins." However, the fall in railway-stock is too much for the heroic de la Pluche: with a note of warning against time-bargains, he retires from the business of speculation, and settles down with the still faithful Mary Hann at the "Wheel of Fortune 'Otel." His name is simple Jeames Plush once more, and he comes off better than most upstarts. But his humour grows with the years, and proves that Thackeray was a more highly accomplished master of his material in 1845 than when he first came upon the town.

But the sentimental stories which he contributed in these early days to the magazines are yet more closely characteristic of his talent, yet more loudly prophetic of what he was presently to achieve. In A Shabby Genteel Story the snob, as he saw him, is already triumphant. Already he can exclaim with rapture, "O, free and happy Britons, what a miserable, truckling,

1 This story was published in Fraser's Magazine in 1840, and reprinted in the Miscellanies of 1855-57.

cringing race ye are!" Already he is eloquent in denunciation of the tuft-hunter, the lick-spittle, the sneak, "the man of a decent middle rank, who affects to despise it, and herds only with persons of the fashion." The author's suspicion of snobbishness is too alert, as it was in the aftertime; his censure of the harmless vanity displayed by foolish men and women is too savage; the pretensions of Mrs Gann are treated with too heavy a hand. But in A Shabby Genteel Story we see the beginning of a talent, exercised in the direction which it would always take, and misapplied with a wilfulness which was constant. Between A Shabby Genteel Story and Philip are many works worthily accomplished; yet a comparison of the two proves that what Thackeray was in 1840 that he remained in 1861. His style had gained an immeasurable ease; his view of life was more settled, if no less sentimental. But the same drama still attracted him: he was still happiest in the contemplation of the petty problems which agitate the minds of snobs, and so profound was his consistency that he closed his career with the same gospel wherewith twenty years before he had commenced it.

A better story both in style and composition is The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond.1 Here, at any rate, is a promise of the best

1 The Great Hoggarty Diamond made its first appearance in Fraser's Magazine in 1841, and was published as a book eight years later.