evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things—of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Saviour.

From 'Marjorie Fleming.'

Sir Walter was in that house almost every day, and had a key, so in he and the hound went, shaking themselves in the lobby. Marjorie! Marjorie!' shouted her friend, where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin doo?' In a moment a bright, eager child of seven was in his arms, and he was kissing her all over. Out came Mrs Keith. 'Come yer ways in, Wattie.' 'No, not now. I am going to take Marjorie wi' me, and you may come to your tea in Duncan Roy's sedan, and bring the bairn home in your lap.' 'Tak' Marjorie, and it on-ding o' snaw!' said Mrs Keith. He said to himself, 'On-ding-that's odd that is the very word.' 'Hoot, awa! look here,' and he displayed the corner of his plaid, made to hold lambs-(the true shepherd's plaid, consisting of two breadths sewed together, and uncut at one end, making a poke or cul de sac). Tak' yer lamb,' said she, laughing at the contrivance, and so the Pet was first well happit up, and then put, laughing silently, into the plaidneuk, and the shepherd strode off with his lamb-Maida gambolling through the snow, and running races in her mirth.

6

Didn't he face' the angry airt,' and make her bield his bosom, and into his own room with her, and lock the door, and out with the warm, rosy, little wifie, who took it all with great composure! There the two remained for three or more hours, making the house ring with their laughter; you can fancy the big man's and Maidie's laugh. Having made the fire cheery, he set her down in his ample chair, and standing sheepishly before her, began to say his lesson, which happened to be-'Ziccoty, diccoty, dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck wan, down the mouse ran, ziccoty, diccoty, dock.' This done repeatedly till she was pleased, she gave him his new lesson, gravely and slowly, timing it upon her small fingers-he saying it after her

'Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven ;
Alibi, crackaby, ten, and eleven;
Pin, pan, musky, dan;

Tweedle-um, twoddle-um, twenty-wan;
Eerie, orie, ourie; you, are, out.'

He pretended to great difficulty, and she rebuked him with most comical gravity, treating him as a child. He used to say that when he came to Alibi Crackaby he broke down, and Pin-Pan, Musky-Dan, Tweedle-um Twoddle-um made him roar with laughter. He said Musky-Dan especially was beyond endurance, bringing up an Irishman and his hat fresh from the Spice Islands and odoriferous Ind; she getting quite bitter in her displeasure at his ill behaviour and stupidness.

Then he would read ballads to her in his own glorious way, the two getting wild with excitement over Gil Morrice or the Baron of Smailholm; and he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat Constance's speeches in King John, till he swayed to and fro sobbing his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature, like one possessed, repeating

'For I am sick, and capable of fears,

Oppressed with wrong, and therefore full of fears;
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears;
A woman, naturally born to fears.'

'If thou that bidst me be content, wert grim, Ugly and slanderous to thy mother's womb, Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious-' Or, drawing herself up to the height of her great argument '

'I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,

For grief is proud, and makes his owner stout.
Here I and sorrow sit.'

Scott used to say that he was amazed at her power over him, saying to Mrs Keith, She's the most extraordinary creature I ever met with, and her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does.'

From 'Minchmoor.'

Now that everybody is out of town, and every place in the guide-books is as well known as Princes Street or Pall Mall, it is something to discover a hill everybody has not been to the top of, and which is not in Black. Such a hill is Minchmoor, nearly three times as high as Arthur Seat, and lying between Tweed and Yarrow.

The best way to ascend it is from Traquair. You go up the wild old Selkirk road, which passes almost right over the summit, and by which Montrose and his cavaliers fled from Philiphaugh, where Sir Walter's mother remembered crossing, when a girl, in a coach-and-six, on her way to a ball at Peebles, several footmen marching on either side of the carriage to prop it up or drag it out of the moss haggs; and where, to our amazement, we learned that the Duchess of Buccleuch had lately driven her ponies. Before this we had passed the grey, oldworld entrance to Traquair House, and looked down its grassy and untrod avenue to the pallid, forlorn mansion, stricken all o'er with eld, and noticed the wrought-iron gate embedded in a foot deep and more of soil, never having opened since the '45. There are the huge Bradwardine bears on each side-most grotesque supporters -with a superfluity of ferocity and canine teeth. The whole place, like the family whose it has been, seems dying out-everything subdued to settled desolation. The old race, the old religion, the gaunt old house, with its small, deep, comfortless windows, the decaying trees, the stillness about the doors, the grass overrunning everything, nature reinstating herself in her quiet way-all this makes the place look as strange and pitiful among its fellows in the vale as would the Earl who built it three hundred years ago if we met him tottering along our way in the faded dress of his youth; but it looks the Earl's house still, and has a dignity of its own.

We soon found the Minchmoor road, and took at once to the hill, the ascent being, as often is with other ascents in this world, steepest at first. Nothing could be more beautiful than the view as we ascended, and got a look of the 'eye sweet' Tweed hills and their silver stream.' It was one of the five or six good days of this summerin early morning, 'soft' and doubtful; but the mists drawing up, and now the noble, tawny hills were dappled with gleams and shadows

'Sunbeams upon distant hills gliding apace '—

the best sort of day for mountain scenery-that ripple of light and shadow brings out the forms and the depths of the hills far better than a cloudless sky; and the horizon is generally wider.

Before us and far away was the round flat head of Minchmoor, with a dark, rich bloom on it, from the thick, short heather-the hills around being green.

Near the top, on the Tweed side, its waters trotting away cheerily to the glen at Bold, is the famous Cheese Well-always full, never overflowing. Here every traveller-Duchess, shepherd, or houseless mugger— stops, rests, and is thankful; doubtless so did Montrose, poor fellow, and his young nobles and their jaded steeds, on their scurry from Lesly and his Dragoons. It is called the Cheese Well from those who rest there dropping in bits of their provisions, as votive offerings to the fairies whose especial haunt this mountain was. After our rest and drink, we left the road and made for the top. When there we were well rewarded. The great round-backed, kindly, solemn hills of Tweed, Yarrow, and Ettrick lay all about like sleeping mastiffs-too plain to be grand, too ample and beautiful to be commonplace.

From 'The Enterkin.'

One guard I remember well-M'George. He had been in the army, and was a gentleman-stern and not given to speak; even with his companion the driver he would let a whole day pass in silence—a handsome, firm, keen face. I remember well, too, when I had gone day after day to meet the Mail, to be taken into Edinburgh to school after my vacation among the hills, and to my rapture the Mail was full, and we came back rejoicing at the respite. 'Is she full?' asked again my grave and dear old uncle, six feet and more on his soles. 'Yes,' said M'George, with a gentle grin, and looking me in the face; 'she's full of emptiness!' whereupon the High School boy was bundled inside, and left to his meditations. Our guard, I must say, came and looked in upon me at each stage, comforting me greatly with some jargonelle pears, the smell and relish of which I can feel now. I fell asleep, of course, and when we stopped at the Black Bull, found myself snug in the potentate's greatcoat. All this impressed me the more when I heard of his death many years after. It was a snowstorm-a night of wild drift-in midwinter: nothing like it for years. The Mail from Dumfries was late, and the townspeople of Moffat had gathered at Mrs Cranstoun's inn waiting for it. Up it came. They crowded round M'George, entreating him not to proceed-'At Tweedshaws it'll be awful.' But he put them aside. 'They' (meaning the Post-Office authorities) blamed me once; they'll never blame me again.' And saddling the two strongest horses, he and the driver mounted and took their way into the night, stumbling dumbly up the street. The driver returned, having at the Beef-Tub-a wild hollow in the hills, five miles out of Moffat-given it up in despair, and in time; M'George plunging on, and not to be spoken to. The riderless horse came back at midnight. Next morning at daybreak-the wind hushed, the whole country silent and white-a shepherd saw on the heights at Tweedshaws something bright like a flame. He made his way to it-it was the morning sun shining on the brass-plate of the post-bags, hung up on a bit of paling-we have seen the very stake-and out of the snow stretched a hand, as if pointing to the bags: M'George dead, and, as the shepherd said, 'wi' a kind o' a pleesure on his face.'

'Stern daughter of the voice of God,

We know not anything so fair

As is the smile upon thy face.'

See Swinburne's Sonnet, John Brown and his Sisters (6th ed. 1903), and Peddie's Recollections of Dr John Brown (1893).

Bishop Colenso (JOHN WILLIAM COLENSO; 1814-83) was born at St Austell in Cornwall, and graduating in 1836 from St John's College, Cambridge, as second wrangler, was elected a Fellow. Successively assistant-master at Harrow, tutor at Cambridge, and rector of Forncett St Mary in Norfolk, he published handbooks on algebra in 1848 and on trigonometry in 1851, and a volume of Village Sermons in 1853, in which same year he was appointed the first Bishop of Natal. He soon mastered the Zulu language, prepared a grammar and dictionary, and translated the PrayerBook and part of the Bible. In a Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1861) he rejected the doctrine of eternal punishment. Largely through questions asked and puzzles propounded by his Zulu converts, he became convinced of the improbability of many statements of facts and numbers in the Bible; and The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (7 parts, 1862-79) brought down upon its writer an avalanche of criticism, and was condemned in both Houses of Convocation. In 1864 he was deposed from his see by his Metropolitan, Bishop Gray of Capetown; but on appeal the Privy-Council declared the deposition 'null and void' (1865); and in 1866 the Court of Chancery ordered the payment of his income, with arrears-though Bishop Gray next publicly excommunicated him, and consecrated a new bishop, so that the feud of spiritual jurisdictions and theological controversy lasted for years. In 1874 Colenso visited England and pleaded the cause of Langalibalele, a dispossessed Zulu chief. He was author of Ten Weeks in Natal (1855), The New Bible Commentary Literally Examined (1871-74), Lectures on the Pentateuch and the Moabite Stone (1873), and a volume of Sermons (1873). His works on algebra and arithmetic are still standard school-books; his name is remembered as that of, for many years, the best-abused man in England; but his special arguments and contentions now occupy but an infinitesimal place in the established theories of moderate critics. He was prodigiously in earnest, but he was not a profound or widely-read divine, hardly in a professional sense a competent theologian; it was his peculiar hap, being not merely a Churchman but a bishop, to insist, in an inevitable and irritating way, on facts and figures, incredible or self-contradictory, which were completely irreconcilable with the belief in verbal inspiration then still professedly maintained by the orthodox British Churches; as Dean Stanley said, 'He made an epoch in Biblical criticism by his straightforwardness,' though Churchmen and evangelical Nonconformists now often frankly assume Colenso's painful results as foregone conclusions or assumptions, and in such works as the Encyclopædia Biblica propound theories much more 'advanced' than Colenso's farthest, and much more subversive of dogmatic orthodoxy. See Life by Sir G. W. Cox (2 vols. 1888).

a large and many-branched family, whose energies were engaged in the army, the Church, the learned professions. As with many another English family, the rapid development of India after Clive's successes offered a new and attractive field to the enterprise of the Thackerays. Thus it happened that the grandfather of the novelist, also named William Makepeace, began his career in India in the year 1766, holding several posts in Bengal under the governorship of Cartier. It was distinctly a successful career, the elder William Makepeace Thackeray being a man of energy and capacity. By various speculations, notably as a mighty hunter and snarer of elephants and as a provider of live elephants to the East India Company, the novelist's grandfather was able to make a respectable fortune. In 1776 he married Amelia Richmond, daughter of Colonel Richmond Webb, a descendant of the famous General Webb who fought in the wars of Marlborough, and is figured in Esmond. The fourth child of this marriage was Richmond Thackeray, the father of the novelist. Like his father he entered the Company's service; in 1807 he was appointed secretary to the Board of Revenue in Calcutta. From all accounts, including Sir William Hunter's interesting record, The Thackerays in India, Richmond Thackeray was a man of fine culture and artistic

taste.

In 1810 he married Anne, the daughter of John Harman Becher, and in the year following was appointed to a collectorship which was accounted one of the prizes of the Bengal service. Richmond Thackeray did not live to enjoy further advancement in the service; he died at Calcutta in 1816, leaving one child only, but one who was destined to make his name immortal. The fatherless boy was despatched to England in 1817 to the care of his aunt, Mrs Ritchie. Sir Leslie Stephen relates that on the way home the ship put in at St Helena, where a black servant took young Thackeray to Longwood and showed him Napoleon -'eating three sheep a day and all the young children he could catch.' This impressive visit, it will be seen, was not forgotten when Thackeray came to write his lectures on 'The Four Georges.' The year following this voyage home his widowed mother was married to Major H. W. Carmichael Smyth, of the Bengal Engineers. In 1821 the Smyths left India for England, and lived at Addiscombe, where for a while Major Smyth filled the post of superintendent of the East India Company's Military College. After several terms at private schools in the country, Thackeray opened an important phase of his life by entering the Charterhouse in 1822, where he remained until 1828. Of his school life he has left in Pendennis and other of his works vivid sketches, some

of them distinctly disagreeable. That the Charterhouse should be transformed to 'Slaughterhouse' is sufficiently eloquent of the force of these first impressions. Later, it is shown that time brought some amelioration of his bitterness, and in The Newcomes the old school, with more seemly reverence, appears as 'Greyfriars.' But on the whole the 'pretty, gentle boy,' as he is described by his schoolfellow and friend G. S. Venables, felt no great liking for his school. Like some other men of genius, though he was not unpopular, and duly reached the first class and acted as monitor, Thackeray scarcely distinguished himself in the eyes of his masters. He has recorded that he was 'licked into indolence' as a child, and when older was 'abused into sulkiness' and 'bullied into despair.' Evidently, from this reminiscent summary, his boyhood was not marked by the light-hearted joyousness which some have been blessed with. One incident of his school-days must be noted, since it is connected with the literary pseudonym by which he first became known to the public. In a fight with Venables he had the misfortune to come off with a broken nose, which accident led to the characteristic adoption of the name 'Michael Angelo' prefixed to that of Mr Titmarsh. Characteristic, also, were the early proofs he showed of his powers in burlesque and parody. His passion for drawing whimsical or extravagant representations of his fellows found expression while he was still a boy. Naturally, the satiric impulse at first expressed itself in a frolic spirit in broad elementary fashion. He indulged his gift just for the mere fun of it. On leaving school he went to live near Ottery St Mary, and it is recorded that here he made what was probably his first appearance in print with a parody of Moore's poem 'The Minstrel Boy.' Like Pendennis, he made his contribution to the local newspaper. About this time it is said, on the authority of Dr Cornish, the vicar of Ottery, that he adorned a copy of Cary's translation of the Birds of Aristophanes with three humorous drawings in water-colour.

In February 1829 Thackeray went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. His stay there was but brief, for in the following year he left. Short as was his experience of university life, there is no doubt it stimulated his natural bias towards literature. He has said that he wasted his time' there; the statement, however, must not be accepted with a rigid literalness. It was not unprofitable to renew his friendship with Venables, and to make others that were to endure for life with Spedding, FitzGerald, Tennyson, Monckton Milnes, W. H. Brookfield, and other men who were to achieve distinction. In this society his literary tastes were proclaimed. He liked literary discussion, it is said, and helped to found an 'Essay Club,' of which W. H. Thompson, who subsequently became Master of the college, was a member. To a university journal known as The Snob-a title

one would like to think he invented-he contributed a mock-heroic poem on Timbuctoo, the subject of the Chancellor's prize poem, in competition for which Tennyson was successful. There were some characteristic couplets in this jeu d'esprit. He had a share also in starting The Gownsman, a paper established soon after the premature decease of The Snob. On leaving Cambridge he spent some time in Paris and Weimar, studying French and German. He applied himself in Paris for a time to the study of drawing, with the intention of becoming an artist; probably it was his distaste for the routine of study rather than the superior attraction of literature that prevented him from acquiring any mastery of the technique of the art. Drawing for him became henceforth the handmaid of burlesque and satire. At Weimar he seems to have delighted himself in the social life of the place, and like everybody met the illustrious Goethe, then in the enjoyment of a serene old age and the object of the world's worship. Thackeray's studies here were carried on, as he says, 'lying on

regularly in a certain number of hours. Nor is it necessary to assume that Thackeray was idle when he reclined on a sofa, reading novels or dreaming; far more certain is it that he was laying by stores of the material of sweet and bitter fancy. 'Je cuve mon sujet,' a great French painter said when his friends accused him of idleness. While he was living on the Continent his family wished him to study law, and on his return to England in 1831 he entered the Middle Temple and began to read for

a sofa reading novels and dreaming.' This admission, though it hints of idleness, must not be taken literally as implying a wasting of time. Thackeray's humour was apt to indulge itself in self-mockery of this kind. Anthony Trollope, in his contribution to English Men of Letters'-a book that suggests more problems of interest than it solveshas a great deal to say about Thackeray's idleness. 'He was always idle,' says this critic. He was not what is called a 'business man,' it may be admitted, neither as a writer nor as an editor. It is evident that Trollope looked upon Thackeray's 'idleness' as a very serious matter. He judged Thackeray by his own standard, and, as is well known, Trollope's method of working was specially regular. The truth is, it seems to me, that he exaggerates what was unpractical' in Thackeray. A man

of letters is not to be considered idle because he does not produce daily a certain amount of work

the Bar; but he speedily found the study extremely uncongenial, and delivered his mind on the subject in terms of vehement dislike. In the meanwhile he was being thrown more and more into the society of writers

and artists, and about this time had made the acquaintance of F. S. Mahony ('Father Prout') and Maginn, then becoming famous as a writer and a wit. Coming of age in 1832, Thackeray inherited a fortune of about £500 a year, and with it the opportunity of gratifying an ambition that is not uncommon among literary men. In the following year he became pro

prietor and editor of a paper then newly established, known as the National Standard. This venture came to an end in a few months, and Thackeray lost £200 by it. The failure did not daunt him. With the assistance of Major Smyth, his stepfather, and of others, in 1836 he became engaged on another newspaper, the Constitutional, which, however, ran for little more than a year when the capital invested in it gave out. Trollope declares we have Thackeray's account of this speculation in the amusing description in Lovel the Widower of the purchase of 'that neat little paper The Museum, of the wheedling Honeyman, and the queer wine merchant and bill-discounter Sherrick.' The fortune that had come to Thackeray in 1832 had disappeared within two years; the loss is accounted for by the failure of an Indian bank, and by certain other speculations besides newspaper enterprises. It is supposed that, like

Pendennis, he had acquired expensive habits at Cambridge, among which was the taste for gambling. On the authority of Sir Theodore Martin, the vivid satirical story of 'The Amours of Deuceace,' told by Mr Yellowplush, was suggested by his own experience. Years after this period he pointed out in the street at Spa a gambler whom he had not seen 'since he drove me down in his cabriolet to my bankers in the city, where I sold out my patrimony and handed it over to him.' It was about the year 1834 that he was confronted with the necessity of working for a living. Although art was his selection, literature was to prevail. In 1836, the year of the starting of the Constitutional, Thackeray married the daughter of Colonel Shawe, of Doneraile in County Cork. The marriage took place in Paris, according to Mr F. T. Marzials, who first made known the official record, at the British Embassy on the 20th August. About a month later he began his contributions to the Constitutional; but the paper came to an end in the following summer, and Thackeray returned to London. Much more important than these newspaper speculations was the connection which Thackeray formed about this period with Fraser's Magazine. What were his claims to be included in the Fraserian brotherhood, in Maclise's drawing for the January number of 1835, is by no means certain. By 1837, however, he was a member of the staff and a regular contributor.

Thackeray was fairly launched on his career through his connection with Fraser's.

His oppor

tunity had come. It has been asserted that his subsequent contributions to Punch gained him immediate popularity. If the Snob Papers did more at the time to make his name known than the 'Letters of Mr C. J. Yellowplush,' or such a masterpiece as Catherine, or the Great Hoggarty Diamond-with which Thackeray signalised his admission to the Fraserian circle-the result was due to certain fortuitous circumstances. It is not to be regarded as an instance of the ephemeral triumphing over the more weighty literary production. When Thackeray began his famous studies, which may be called an Anatomy of Snobbery, Punch was rising on the top wave of popularity, thanks to the inimitable drawings of Leech. The subject, too, was 'in the air;' it possessed an irresistible social appeal. Now, although the snob is always with us, I doubt if any member of the present generation can conceive the prodigious effect the Snob Papers produced on early Victorian society. The theme was new; the exponent was But now the edge of the novelty is worn down; and although we acknowledge the mastery, we are conscious of certain flaws, certain excesses and insobrieties in the satirical analysis that were not perceptible to the contemporary reader. With regard to the correspondence of Mr C. J. Yellowplush, it is different. Time has not modified the force and piquancy of these amusing sketches which ran through Fraser's in 1837-38. 'Miss

a master.

Shum's Husband' diverts us as it must ever divert. The story of Mr Deuceace, which is told in two sections, is as clear and convincing an example of the blossoming that is the promise of genius as was ever produced by genius. This pungent and bitter little story is unmistakably prophetic-as the sketch of Crab the cynical nobleman alone may show-of the coming Vanity Fair. In the Epistles to the Literati the satire and burlesque of Mr Yellowplush deal with subjects that enjoy an imperishable vitality. The kind of poetry that is here satirised may take on new guises, but it never dies and ever has admirers of its specious charms. Inflated nonsense in blank verse still passes for poetic drama, and unreal sentiment for pathos or passion. Thackeray's criticism of Bulwer Lytton and Dr Lardner has been censured as savage. He lived to think it too severe, it is said; but I do not think there is any injustice in it. The story of Catherine, which appeared in Fraser's in 18391840, was professedly written in ridicule of certain popular or fashionable novels by Bulwer Lytton, Harrison Ainsworth, and others, in which some criminal or vicious person was endowed with the virtues proper to a hero. The burlesque intent of Thackeray is now the least notable thing about Catherine; at the time, however, it served a very real purpose, and one that the author believed in all sincerity was eminently needed. There is no doubt of the seriousness of Thackeray's crusade against shams of all kinds, nor of the didactic aim that was involved in it. But, fortunately, his satiric humour was still stronger, as was also the artistic instinct in the story-teller; hence he does not labour with his didactic aim nor put it to an extreme. The reader of Catherine speedily forgets it altogether, and it seems to me that when the author recurs to it, in the person of the pseudonymous Ikey Solomons, junior, it is not without a suggestion of sudden transition, as if he too had been better engaged. After all, a little philosophic reflection convinces the reader that the ascription of heroic qualities to lawless characters like Jack Sheppard or Paul Clifford is a very intelligible and very human foible, of which Claude Duval and even Robin Hood are yet more popular examples. It would be easy to make too much of it; this, it is needless to say, is what Thackeray does not do. In writing Catherine, he set out to paint vice as a thing

Of such hideous mien

As to be hated needs but to be seen.

He selected from The Newgate Calendar a story of murder of the most revolting kind conceivable, told with all the crudity and brutal realism of which plain prose is capable. For once those excellent attorneys Messrs Knapp and Baldwin, the compilers of that gruesome calendar, have no need, as was their wont, to moralise their tale; the horror of it, one thinks, could not be surpassed. Thackeray adopts but the mere framework. Without using one jot of the horrible