austere farmer who would have planted Chambord with turnips, whose thoughts were so easily diverted from the palaces of the great to drill-ploughs and harrows, and who, nevertheless, foresaw the coming reign of terror, which had been suspected by none save himself and Lord Chesterfield. But Thackeray did not need to go back to the eighteenth century for an example. Charles Dickens, his great contemporary, had already shown, in Sketches by Boz, what sympathy and imagination might discover in the familiar haunts of one's own city. But, for all that, when Thackeray set out to paint for his countrymen the character and aspect of Paris, he was essaying, in the guise of a picturesque reporter, a kind of writing as yet unstaled by sanguine ignorance and the exigence of a daily paper.

From several points of view Thackeray seemed well equipped for the task. He was the master of an easy style, more familiar than correct, more boisterous than energetic. But such as it was, it fitted the picturesque reporter like a glove. High spirits were his constant companions, even when judgment deserted him for a while, and he carried his readers in and out the theatres, picture-galleries, and gardens of Paris with unfailing vivacity. Moreover, if his understanding was often befogged, he possessed an intricate knowledge of his subject; the French capital had been his second home; its life and literature had been familiar to him from his boyhood; he had lived there not merely as an opulent tourist, or as a light-hearted student in its schools of art,

He had,

but as a poor stranger writing for a living. therefore, every opportunity of expelling prejudice, and of combating that hasty generalisation which is the bane of the picturesque reporter.

Best of all, after Cambridge, he came to a Paris quick with "movements," alert with genius and gaiety. The victorious Romantiques were in full possession of the citadel; Hugo and Dumas were making an easy conquest of the playhouses, while Balzac was creating his country anew in the Comédie Humaine. Had he chosen, Thackeray might have read the works of Stendhal and Michelet, of Mérimée and George Sand, of Musset and Gautier, hot from the press. It was, too, the heyday of the grisette, when she and her longhaired companion danced and chatted and laughed with a zest and extravagance unknown to our chastened epoch. Fantasy and wit were in the air; a thousand Lucien de Rubemprés were entering Paris at every gate, and dreaming their dreams of poetry and triumph under the trees of the Luxembourg, or listening to the tempting voice of Lousteau and his kin beneath the shadows of its gracious palace. And the joy of life taught Thackeray to appreciate at least the one charm of France which cannot grow old. "I never landed at Calais pier," says he, "without feeling that a load of sorrow was left on the other side the water;" in brief, the sparkling air of France, the sense of holiday, the feeling of a vivid intelligence abroad, the consciousness that the people are gayer than ourselves,

that, whether right or wrong, their thoughts are quicker and more whimsical-all this Thackeray suggests in spite of himself.

Even when the fêtes of July fill his austere soul with contempt, he owns that the sight is brilliant, happy, and beautiful. "If you want to see the French people to the greatest advantage," he writes, "you should go to a festival like this, where their manners and innocent gaiety show a very pleasing contrast to the coarse and vulgar hilarity which the same class exhibit in our own country at Epsom racecourse, for instance, or Greenwich Fair." Again, he frankly acknowledges the delight which the French take in comely surroundings, in the beauty of restaurants, even in the proper adornment of a dirty, inodorous wine-shop. He is enthusiastic when he sees a crowd of mechanics, endimanchés, gazing with intelligent interest at the treasures of the Louvre; he freely owns that the French possess, what we do not, an abstract appreciation of art. Even when he parades his own sentimental method of criticism, he still reflects that Paris is a paradise of painters, and that the happy student who starves au sixième may wander all the day long in the resplendent palace of kings and emperors. So far his sympathy takes him; but an inborn Philistinism peeps out all the same, and he woefully misreads the character of our neighbours.

He expects in the French the same political intelligence which he finds in the English. He laughs

furiously at the fêtes of July, because the revolution, which they celebrate, is in his eye a failure. He solemnly reproves the "Sancho-like gravity and naïveté" wherewith they applaud the achievements of Louis Philippe, whom he finds a contemptible monarch. But he forgets, in this heavy-handed reproof, that the Parisians are children of fancy, changeable and whimsical; children, too, who know the rules of logic, and who gladly proceed from false premisses to a logical, if a false, conclusion. For such vagaries as these he finds no censure too severe. The monarchy, says he, is a sham, liberty is a sham, the people is a political sham.

So he belabours monarch and people with a strange lack of humour and sympathy. Heine, his great contemporary, who was sitting in the same stalls, reading the same newspapers, witnessing the same festivals and processions, saw the truth with a far keener eye than did Thackeray. He knew that the French are comedians by nature, ready to take service under any manager, and to do their best for him whether he be Charles X. or Louis Philippe. In their view "the play's the thing," and politics are but a single scene in the drama of life. Panem et circenses they love with a constant heart, and the circus is yet more to their mind than the bread. But Thackeray would demand of them political wisdom as well; he would ask them, when they were enjoying fireworks and the fresh air, if their enjoyment were justified by the political situation. And they would reply, properly

D

enough, that a pageant needed no excuse, and that a summer holiday was its own justification.

Even The Second Funeral of Napoleon,1 Thackeray's liveliest essay in reporting, might have been touched with a lighter hand. True, nothing could have been more ridiculous than the behaviour of the Duc de Joinville, who, at the mere rumour of war with England, threw his comfortable furniture overboard, turned his yacht into a man-of-war, and exacted an oath from every man of his crew that he would die rather than give up the bones of the dead Emperor to the hated English. The hated English had entertained the Duc de Joinville with all the honours; they had intrusted the sacred coffin to his keeping, having previously carried it to the sea upon their own shoulders. But no sooner was his precious freight on board than the Duc de Joinville wished to play another part-the part of the soldier who would die but not surrender. Though an attack was out of the question, the hero would not be foiled of his applause, and seriously to

1 The Second Funeral of Napoleon was published in 1841. Thackeray, with Monckton Milnes for companion, witnessed the ceremony performed at the Invalides, and wrote his account posthaste. The work, in fact, was compiled in four days, the ballad being added as an afterthought." The ballad "The Chronicles of the Drum"-is the best of its kind that Thackeray ever wrote. The little book had a certain success. Writing to W. H. Thompson in 1841, Edward FitzGerald asked: "Have you read Thackeray's little book-the second Funeral of Napoleon? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy it as each copy sold puts 71⁄2d. in T.'s pocket, which is very empty just now, I take it."