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spared the lives of their tormentors and suffered them to depart unharmed. Charles of Anjou had to witness, with gestures of impotent rage, the burning of that fleet which was to have conquered Constantinople; and Sicily was lost to France.

We have not driven a nation to madness by a taxation that has made every man's life a burden. We have never by barbarous ravage provoked the reprisals of treachery and torture. The hatred which rages against us in the heart of the Hindoo is the rage of a creature credulous as a child. It is not for what we have done, but for what the Mohammedan has persuaded him we were going to do, that he is now so athirst for the blood of every 'Feringhee.' It is not the people of Hindostan who have risen against us. Whatever may

have been our faults, it cannot be denied that we have protected and benefited that people while we have taxed them. It is the sepoy army only that has dreamt of our extermination,-the men whom we have humoured till they detected our weakness and felt their own strength. The opportunity we have afforded them will be a marvel to all time. This is a fact unparalleled in history,—that a nation should annex province after province and expect to hold them in security almost solely by means of troops taken from the subject provincials themselves. Our traditional policy has been a singular mixture of concession and contempt. When we conceded so much as we did to their prejudices, we should have abated a little of our contempt for their powers.

SECTION II.

Fragments of Criticism.

Thackeray's Esmond.'

O small expectation was awakened when it was announced that

No

the author of Vanity Fair was about to appear before us in a new walk of fiction. The period selected was one of great and varied interest. He had already portrayed with skill its literary characteristics, in a course of lectures recently delivered. It remained to be seen how far the art which had depicted so successfully times present, or very near our own, would add to its triumphs among scenes and characters more remote. The new work could neither be assisted nor injured by the fragmentary method of monthly publication. It would be written, as it would be read, at once. It would probably be carefully matured and harmonized throughout— 'teres atque rotundus.'

Taken as a whole, Esmond will not disappoint those who are best able to appreciate the real excellence of this popular author. The devourer of novels, greedy for mere excitement, will pronounce the book heavy. The action is, indeed, in some parts much too tardy. The preface, and the introductory part of the story, though well written, introduce the characters awkwardly. The reader wishes for a genealogical tree of this confusing Castlewood family, and only begins fairly to enjoy that part of the book on a second reading. An author should endeavour to interest his readers as early as pos

sible in the actors of his piece. He should never cool their ardour or dissipate their good-humour by any needless difficulty at the outset. We should not be initiated in the secrets of a story, as the candidate of old in the arcana of Egyptian priestcraft, through a porchway of grievous preliminary probation. Mystery allures us onward—it is the veil upon the statue. Obscurity repels—it is as though the author chose a foggy morning for our day's journey in his company. We do not travel very far, however, with Mr. Thackeray's Esmond, before the sun breaks out, and we thoroughly enjoy ourselves. Many novels which open with the pretence of being household narratives, belie their name ere long, and lose all verisimilitude, by a change of style or plot quite at variance with the title they bear. The fiction of an autobiography is felt to be a mere trick. The family story is like a text, taken, not to be expounded, but abandoned; not as the theme of the discourse, but as the point from which it is to diverge. The hero who tells the tale is discovered, before the end of the first volume, to be possessed by the novelist—his individuality is merged in that of the author, and it is he who reflects, describes, or satirizes. Mr. Thackeray has succeeded perfectly in his disguise. The book does read more like a family memoir than a novel. The scenes of Vanity Fair and Pendennis were crowded with characters. Here the interest centres upon two or three. The action embraces the best part of a life-time. The pathos is that of secret home-sorrow, the incidents such as were happening every day. If, in not a few places, the reflections of Esmond are obviously a vehicle for the pensive and desponding satire of Thackeray, the writer is at least free from the fault of having selected as his representative a character to whom such thoughts would be uncongenial. It would be most unreasonable to require of an author, so circumstanced, that he should deny his nature, and divest himself of that idiosyncrasy which stamps his productions as his own. It is sufficient to demand that he should not be himself in the wrong place— that he should not be unnaturally natural. This law Mr. Thackeray has satisfactorily obeyed.

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There is this great difference between Scott and his imitators in the management of the historical novel : he wrote with a mind stored already with the requisite historic and antiquarian lore; they have, for the most part, visibly crammed' for the occasion. Their personages resemble the man smothered in the crowd, described by Fuller as 'perfect and entire, wanting nothing but breath.' They are painfully accurate in costume and detail. All Meyrick's ancient armour clatters down upon their pages-bascinet and camail, testieres, guiges, plastrons, jupons, jambeaux,—we are not spared a single strap or rivet. Their descriptions are frivolously pedantic as the frisks, turns, and demi-pommadas of Captain Tripet in his famous battle with Gymnast. As Corporal Trim said, 'one home-thrust with the bayonet is worth them all.' No breathing, tangible body fills out these trophies of accoutrement; and, like the empty suits of ancestral armour which stood round the drinking-hall of old King Biorn, the plumed casques enclose only shadows. Now of any approach to this sin, Mr. Thackeray is perfectly clear; he knows where to stop. Having well digested large information previously acquired, he selects with judgment. Without the parade of intimacy, he displays a familiarity with the characters and habits of the time, the manifest result of thoughtful, discriminating study. Here are no laced coats and hoops enclosing names and nothing more. When Walter Scott was about to write Nigel, he sent up to town for Derham's Artificial Clock-maker. He wanted the book for the character of old David Ramsay, the watchmaker, a man who can scarce talk or hear of anything but his beloved clocks. Yet after such pains to be accurate, Scott allows the dreaming mechanist but a few sentences here and there. An inferior hand, with such an idea and such a mine of terminology, would have thrust him in times without number, and wearied the reader (as much as he did George Heriot) with his perpetual pins and wheels, escapements and calculations. Mr. Thackeray displays, in this respect, the same intuitive sense of fitness. His descriptions, whether unlaboured or elaborately terse, are coloured, as by a master, in a few strong touches. He never stops in his course, or wanders

from it, to hold up to our admiration some choice specimen from the curiosities of literature. We could well have exchanged some of the scenes in those interminable continental campaigns for a peep into the literary coffee-houses of the day, while Mr. Thackeray rekindled for us those coruscations of wit which made there the mimic lightning that played under the clouds of tobacco-smoke. But, with this exception, the great writers of that period could not have been introduced more largely without injury to that unity of purpose which pervades the work. The excellences of the book should be estimated by a consideration of what it is not, as well as by the appreciation of what it actually is. The language of Mr. Thackeray is that of the age he depicts. It is by his style throughout, and not by masses of detail, heaped up here and there by the way, and obstructing the course of the story, that he evinces his complete acquaintance with those times. The structure of the sentences-now their involution, their parenthesis, their pendent clauses (which with us would be separate sentences)—now their manly idiomatic simplicity, their vigour sometimes, and mostly their graceful ease all combine to transport us irresistibly to the days of Addison and Steele. As a work of art-in thought, in harmony, in finish-Esmond ranks greatly above anything which Mr. Thackeray has yet produced. Some writers endeavour to divert the scrutinizing eye of criticism by clothing their ideas in a dress confessedly careless, somewhat as the Egyptian mother suffers her child to go abroad in a squalid and disorderly attire, that the evil eye may not rest upon and harm it. Not so Mr. Thackeray. He is neither so impatient nor so self-satisfied, as to shrink from taking pains. The characteristics of a particular style are often more strikingly exhibited in a clever imitation than in the original itself. Thus the student who would excel in Latin prose composition, is directed to study, not only Cicero, but also the best writers of Latin in modern times. In the same way, Esmond might be read, apart from its other merits, as a new model of an old style—as a refresh

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