3 lost every officer at Assaye?1 wounded, and captured? 12 and who at Waterloo were Who, roaring "Remember the reduced in a few minutes to ladies! remember the babies!" "a mere cluster, surrounded (of Cawnpore), spoilt their by a bank of the slain"?2 bayonets at Delhi by pinning Whose regimental camp out- immensely greater numbers of side Bhurtpore was decorated Sepoys against the stone walls by order of the general with of a serai. 13 Who, at Ginghilovo, the cannon, eleven in number, sustained twenty charges by which they had captured dur- ten thousand Zulus ? 13 Who, ing the day? From what "in aspect strangely cool, comregiments came Sir Philip pact, and resolute," delivered Sidney, the Duke of Marl- the decisive charge at Maida ? 14 borough, Wolfe, the Duke of Who came out of Culloden with Wellington, Sir John Moore, every bayonet "either bloody -names surely as honourable or bent " ? 15 to a muster-roll as victories on a standard? From what corps 7 the scarcely less distinguished names of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim?9 Who were first across the Douro, twenty-five men "in the midst of the French army "? 10 who first over the chin-deep Espiers at d'Oliginies? 11 Has the reader the faintest idea how many British soldiers died in the Peninsula, how many first-class battles they fought, how many sieges they sustained and how many made, and how many Frenchmen they accounted for in killed, British dead French accounted for 13 The King's Royal Rifle Corps. We might go on questioning for ever: the British Regular Army is, on an average, 250 years old; it contains about 510 distinct bodies of troops; it has been fighting without intermission since its birth, and there has been seldom a year, a corps, or a campaign but has furnished its quota of deeds as amazing as those recorded above. It is a long, long day indeed, of which the burden has been borne as valiantly as by St Christopher, and the heat as undauntedly as by "the holy men from the Assyrians' furnace." 16 2 The 27th (R. Inniskilling Fusiliers). 4 The Buffs. 6 The 20th Foot. 8 The 51st (King's Own Yorkshire L.I.) Borderers). 11 The 10th Foot (Lincoln). 14 The 78th (Seaforth Highs.) and 81st (Loyal N. Lancs.) 19 10 40,000 200,000 15 The 4th (King's Own). 16 Napier. MUSINGS WITHOUT METHOD. THACKERAY'S CENTENARY-THE PROGRESS OF THE NOVEL-THE While Dickens is free of all the world, and has been an influence even in Paris, Thackeray must still restrain his conquests to his own country. The paradoxes of his career are many and not lightly explicable. Having in 'Barry Lyndon' achieved the intellectual triumph of his life, he made no attempt, save in brief passages, ever again to use his supreme gift of irony. Born without a spice of historical justice, he was yet intensely interested in the past. His sketches of Swift and Congreve bear no relation save in name to their originals, nor did he ever scruple to make the heroes of the eighteenth century the pack-saddle-asses of Victorian sentiment. Yet in 'Esmond' he produced by far the best historical novel of his generation, and in 'Vanity Fair' he painted such a picture of manners, and with so sure a hand, that it will survive even the superfluous whimperings of its author. IF the custom of keeping appreciation to the land of centenaries is anything better his birth. than a trick of advertisement, we are in duty bound to do honour this month to the memory of William Makepeace, Thackeray. The author of 'Vanity Fair,' born a hundred years ago, long since took his place among the masters of English prose. His works are part and parcel of our literature. All the forms of immortality, gay or dull, are his by right of conquest. Every intelligent Briton delights in his "cynicism," or sheds tears over his "sentimentality at the proper time. Never again will he be dislodged from the firm place which he holds in our text-books of literature. His merits are as intimately familiar to the readers of fiction as his faults. The ease of his picaresque manner, his large canvases packed with a vast number of well-drawn characters, his pleasant disdain of plan and hero, will win him unnumbered admirers unto the the end of time. His tiresome habit of obtruding himself, the furious rage with which he takes moral shies at the Aunt Sallies of his own creation, his ready subservience to his own place and time, will limit his And as we take for granted the genius of Thackeray, we may take the chance his centenary gives us to look back over the hundred years which have passed since his birth and attempt to estimate what pro- then as now in pursuing a lucrative trade. Mankind is not far divorced from the monkey, and is yet more loyal to the habit of imitation than that wayward beast. When one man has found an idea, there are always a hundred ready to mimic it. "Hobbs hints blue, straight he turtle eats; Dobbs paints blue, claret crowns his cup; Nokes outdoes Stokes in azure feats," and not one of them knows or cares who fished the murex up. The great Sir Walter, it is true, came into his inheritance of fame and appreciation at once; but the most of the popular novels which delighted the careless reader a century since were long ago lost in oblivion. gress or retrogression has been It is an interesting phenomenon, this resolute and sincere flattery of the great, in the history of letters. At every epoch you may mark it, and it gives the literary historian the chance to preach of schools and their tendencies. Its real origin lies no deeper than greed or folly. All the world believes that profit pursues fashion, and if a wise man shows the way to success, why should not the fools follow it? In the late seventeenth century, when the returning king brought back a smile of gaiety to a land submerged in Puritanism, the road to fame lay through the drama. For some sixty years Comedy was the supreme mistress of literary England. Those there were, of course, who pursued other forms of litera ture, as there will always be some to chafe at the chains of a popular slavery. But Comedy seemed the easiest, as well as the most swiftly rewarded, expression of talent, and every man who could hold a pen aspired to be a playwright. And how dull, save the best, are all the productions of that age! Though Dryden and Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, still hold their place in the world's esteem, the rest have found in oblivion their proper place. That The Way of the World,' a perfect masterpiece, should have been jostled by a vast collection of spurious imitations would surprise us if we did not know the habit of literary gentlemen. The age which produced and succeeded it produced also a larger crop of bad plays, both tragedies and comedies, than any save that which parodied Shakespeare and Webster, Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. That anyone will ever again either read or put upon the stage the facile parodies of Cibber and Nat Lee, of the younger Shadwell and Rowe, of Ravenscroft or Sothern, or half a hundred others, we cannot believe. Their experiments in imitation long since served their turn. They brought their authors now a benefit performance, now a bitter disappointment, and they preserve an interest for none save the patient archæologist. As with the drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it was with the novel of the early nineteenth. Fiction remaining an art for the few, who practised it with dignity and understanding, became for the vast majority of those who hold a pen, a trade and no more. The novels of that age were like the sand in number. A catalogue, printed in 1819, contains no less than thirty thousand examples of fiction, in French or English. Of these, not one per cent is known to-day even by name. Was there ever a bitterer satire on the vanity of human hopes? To discover what were the qualities and demerits of the thirty thousand is an impossible task, which would require, were it attempted, the skill and energy of the excavator. If we may judge from the titles presented to our eager gaze, we may safely conclude that sobbing sentiment and romance, mysterious and transpontine, were best suited to the taste of the time. When they got hold of a good thing, these simple folk of 1819, they did not always appreciate it. The method of classification adopted by the compiler of this catalogue baffles our understanding. What shall we say of the intelligence of one who takes a census of fiction, and classifies 'Guy Mannering' with 'The Monk,' 'Eblis, or the Magic of the Persians,' 'Astrologue,' 'Don Quixote,' and 'Amadis de Gaul' under the pompous heading of "Magic"? Pedantry, in truth, makes strange bedfellows, and it is difficult to say which gets the worst of it in this encounter, Cervantes or Sir Walter Scott. But if, without a vast deal of archæological research, we cannot recover those ancient specimens of fiction, their titles are enough to reveal the humour of the time. Not much imagination is required to divine the character of Montbart, the Exterminator, or the Last of the Filibusters'; and none who has ever held in his hand a "penny dreadful" need have much doubt about 'Brick Bolding, or What is Life?' And as we scan the titles of these thirty thousand forgotten masterpieces, what strikes us most forcibly is their remoteness from life. Eufrasia, or the Ruins of the Castle of Flousca,'-what had that strange piece of fantasy to say to the readers of 1819? Obviously our grandfathers and grandmothers wished for nothing so much as to be "taken out of themselves," as the phrase has it. And "taken out" they were to such purpose, that they seem to have lived in a conventional fairyland of pasteboard and stagetrappings. Meanwhile the novelists of England were rediscovering the fact that the material of infinite romance lay at their doors; that they, no more than Fielding before them, need disdain the life of the road and the tavern. Whether Dickens heard in Pickwick and Sam Weller an echo of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza or not, the essence of his great work was as purely English as its background. There we have the English town and the English countryside, a comedy of English manners, a satire upon English follies. And English as 'Pickwick' is, it is universal in its appeal. The world sets no barrier against it. Wherever it goes, or whatever it does, it is as eagerly welcomed as the romances of Walter Scott. Thackeray also, like Dickens, ranged himself under the ancient banners. He is more closely allied to the great beginners of English fiction than to Ainsworth, the early Bulwer, the young Disraeli, and the rest of his elder contemporaries. He, too, was a painter of manners; he, too, was a satirist in his hours; yet, as we have said, there is something in him of insularity which makes his books almost unintelligible to the foreigner. The English novel and the French had separate qualities and submitted to different influences. Each has progressed in accord with the temperament of the nation which gave it birth. The schools and banners which are necessary always to the life and movement of literary France are unknown on side the Channel, where every man is wont to fight for his own hand and to win or lose his own battle. So strong, indeed, is the Englishman's passion for individuality, that he prefers to be an anarch even in the presence of the greatest leaders. No Briton owed so great a debt to Sir Walter Scott as Balzac gladly confessed, and it must be admitted that no Briton could have our |