beautifullest object in the world," as he calls her, and evidently in reply to applications of her own, which have gone the way of all waste paper, and lighted Dick's pipes which were smoked a hundred and forty years ago-he sends his wife now a guinea, then a half-guinea, then a couple of guineas, then half a pound of tea; and again, no money and no tea at all, but a promise that his darling Prue shall have some in a day or two; or a request, perhaps, that she will send over his night-gown and shaving-plate to the temporary lodging where the nomadic captain is lying hidden from the bailiffs. Oh, that a Christian hero and late Captain in Lucas's should be afraid of a dirty sheriff's officer! That the pink and pride of chivalry should turn pale before a writ! It stands to record in poor Dick's own hand-writing; the queer collection is preserved at the British Museum to this present day; that the rent of the nuptial house in Jermyn-street, sacred to unutterable tenderness and Prue, three doors from Bury-street, was not paid until after the landlord had put in an execution on Captain Steele's furniture. Addison sold the house and furniture at Hampton, and, after deducting the sum in which his incorrigible friend was indebted to him, handed over the residue of the proceeds of the sale to poor Dick, who wasn't in the least angry at Addison's summary proceedings, and I dare say very glad of any sale or execution, the result of which was to give him a little ready money. Having a small house in Jermyn-street for which he couldn't pay, and a country house at Hampton on which he had borrowed money, nothing must content Captain Dick but taking, in 1712, a much finer, larger, and grander house, in Bloomsbury-square; where his unhappy landlord got no better satisfaction than his friend in St. James's; and where it is recorded that Dick giving a grand entertainment, had a half dozen queer-looking fellows in livery to wait upon his noble guests, and confessed that his servants were bailiffs to a man. "I fared like a distressed prince," the kindly prodigal writes, generously complimenting Addison for his assistance in the "Tatler,"-"I fared like a distressed prince, who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid. I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him." Poor, needy prince of Bloomsbury! think of him in his palace, with his allies from Chancery-lane ominously guarding him.

"Alas! for poor Dick Steele! For nobody else of course. There is no man or woman in our time who makes fine projects and gives them up from idleness or want of means. When duty calls upon us, we no doubt are always at home and ready to pay that grim tax-gatherer. When we are stricken with remorse and promise reform, we keep our promise, and are never angry, or idle, or extravagant any more. There are no chambers in our hearts destined for family friends and affections, and now occupied by some Sin's emissary and bailiff in possession. There are no little sins, shabby peccadilloes, importunate remembrances, or disappointed holders of our promises to reform, hovering at our steps, or knocking at our door! Of course not. We are living in the nineteenth century, and poor Dick Steele stumbled and got up again, and got into jail and out again, and sinned and repented; and loved and suffered; and lived and died scores of years ago. Peace be with him! Let us think gently of one who was so gentle let us speak kindly of one whose own breast exuberated with human kindness."

We now come, says Mr. Thackeray, to the greatest name on our list, the highest among the poets, the highest among the English wits, and humourists with whom we have to rank him. And, indeed,

Mr. Thackeray appears to venerate the author of the Dunciadhe respects him as one of the giants of literature-he defers to his judgment, he thinks much of his talents, he pays homage to his genius-he is a very Addison to our Steele, "the person to whom he has looked up with the greatest wonder and reverence, the head boy in his school." If Pope be not a humourist, if the poet of the "Rape of the Lock" be not a wit, who deserves to be called so?

"Besides," continues Mr. Thackeray, "besides that brilliant genius and immense fame, for both of which we should respect him, men of letters should admire him as being the greatest literary artist that England has seen. He polished, he refined, he thought; he took thoughts from other works to adorn and complete his own; borrowing an idea or a cadence from another poet as he would a figure or a simile from a flower, or a river stream, or any object which struck him in his walk, or contemplation of Nature."

Does our author intend to place Pope in the list of vulgar plagiarists? not at all; Pope merely pilfered to perpetuate; he only appropriated to improve. Surely this cannot be Mr. Thackeray's meaning, he does not propose to give such a character to the friend, and the foe of Lady Mary Wortley Montague! However, save some of the early and the amatory of Pope's epistles, in the whole range of literature, no volumes are more delightful.

"You live in them in the finest company in the world. A little stately, perhaps; a little apprêté and conscious they are speaking to whole generations who are listening; but in the tone of their voices-pitched as no doubt they are, beyond the mere conversation key-in the expression of their thoughts, their various views and natures, there is something generous, and cheering, and ennobling. You are in the society of men who have filled the greatest parts in the world's story-you are with St. John the statesman; Peterborough the conqueror; Swift, the greatest wit of all times; Gay, the kindliest laugher; it is a privilege to sit in that company. Delightful and generous banquet! with a little faith and a little fancy any one of us may enjoy it, and conjure up those great figures out of the past, and listen to their wit and wisdom."

Not one of the least amiable traits in Pope's nature was his true and unaffected filial piety; and we are glad to perceive that Mr. Thackeray has not neglected to notice, what as a humourist, and as a man of feeling, he should have been the last to have overlooked, "that constant tenderness and fidelity of affection, which pervaded and sanctified his life."

"It is affecting to note," our author says, "through Pope's correspondence, the marked way in which his friends, the greatest, the most famous, the wittiest men of the time-generals and statesmen, philosophers and divines,-all have a kind word, and a kind thought for the good simple old mother, whom Pope tended so affectionately. Those men would have scarcely valued her, but that they knew how much he loved her, and that they pleased him by thinking of her. If his early letters to women are affected and insincere, whenever he speaks about this one it is with childish tenderness, and an almost sacred simplicity."

On the continuator and the successor of Hume, Mr. Thackeray does not find many words either of praise or of censure: Smollett is treated in altogether a cavalier manner, and the pages devoted to his service are insufficient to display his skill as a novelist; and quite inadequate for the purpose of discussing his claims to appear amongst the magnates of the English humourists. Of Smollett's associates and manner of life, the author of the admirable Humphrey Clinker, has given us an interesting account, in that most amusing of novels. "We have before us," continues Mr. Thackeray, as he sums up in a few lines, his opinion of the character and of the talents of the author of Peregrine Pickle :

"We have before us, and painted by his own hand, Tobias Smollett, the manly, kindly, honest, and irascible; worn and battered, but still brave and full of heart, after a long struggle against a hard fortune. His brain had been busied with a hundred different schemes; he had been reviewer and historian, critic, medical writer, poet, pamphleteer. He had fought endless literary battles; and braved and wielded for years the cudgels of controversy. It was a hard and savage fight in those days, and a niggard pay. He was oppressed by illness, age, narrow fortune; but his spirit was still resolute, and his courage steady; the battle over, he could do justice to the enemy with whom he had been so fiercely engaged, and gave a not unfriendly grasp to the hand that had mauled him. . . . You see somehow that he is a gentleman, through all his battling and struggling, his poverty, his hard-fought successes, and his defeats. His novels are recollections of his own adventures; his characters drawn, as I should think, from personages with whom he became acquainted in his own career of life. Strange companions he must have had; queer acquaintances he made in the Glasgow College-in the country apothecary's shop; in the gun-room of the man-of-war where he served as surgeon, and in the hard life on shore, where the sturdy adventurer struggled for fortune."

With Hogarth the artist, and with Smollett the physician, Mr. Thackeray in the compass of a single lecture, unites the story of the dramatist, Fielding. Fielding is clearly no favourite with Mr. Thackeray he cannot offer, he cannot hope to make a hero of the author of Joseph Andrews: it is not of poor Steele or of the mighty Pope that he now writes, so why should Mr. Thackeray neglect the opportunity to moralise: why hide the faults, why conceal the weaknesses of Harry Fielding? Nevertheless

"Stained as you see him, and worn by care and dissipation, that man retains some of the most precious and splendid human qualities and endowments. He has an admirable natural love of truth, the keenest instinctive antipathy to hypocrisy, the happiest satirical gift of laughing it to scorn. His wit is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and lightens up a rascal like a policeman's lantern. . . . He may have low tastes, but not a mean mind; he admires with all his heart good and virtuous men, stoops to no flattery, bears no rancour, disdains all disloyal arts, does his duty uprightly, is fondly loved by his family, and dies at his work."

We cannot refrain however from quoting the opinion of the author of Esmond, on the chef d'œuvre of Fielding. As a picture

of manners the novel Tom Jones is indeed exquisite: as a work of construction, he continues,

"quite a wonder: the by-play of wisdom; the power of observation; the multiplied felicitous turns and thoughts; the varied character of the great Comic Epic, keep the reader in a perpetual admiration and curiosity. But against Mr. Thomas Jones himself we have a right to put in a protest, and quarrel with the esteem the author evidently has for that character. . . . I can't say that I think Mr. Jones a virtuous character; I can't say but that I think Fielding's evident liking and admiration for Mr. Jones shews that the great humourist's moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in Art and Ethics, there is a great error."

Mr. Thackeray thus indulges in reflections on the plan and design of novel writing, and throws out hints to which it would behove certain popular authors to listen, and to take heed. If it is right to have a hero, whom we may admire, let us at least, Mr. Thackeray urges,

"let us at least take care that he is admirable; if, as is the plan of some authors (a plan decidedly against their interests be it said), it is propounded that there exists in life no such being, and that therefore in novels, the picture of life, there should appear no such character; then Mr. Thomas Jones becomes an admissible person, and we examine his defects and good qualities as we do those of Parson Thwackum, or Miss Seagrim. But a hero with a flawed reputation; a hero spunging for a guinea; a hero who can't pay his landlady, and is obliged to let his honour out to hire, is absurd, and his claim to heroic rank untenable. I protest against Mr. Thomas Jones holding such rank at all. I protest even against his being considered a more than ordinary young fellow, ruddy-cheeked, broadshouldered, and fond of wine and pleasure. He would not rob a church, but that is all; and a pretty long argument may be debated, as to which of these old types, the spendthrift, the hypocrite, Jones and Blifil, Charles and Joseph Surface,-is the worst member of society and the most deserving of censure."

We have now but to take leave of the author; and, we do so in the hope, that the new enterprize with which it is whispered Mr. Thackeray is engaged, may be wanting in none of the beauties of the Lectures on the Humourists, and may, at the same time, be free from many of their faults.

MISS ISABELLA BISP'S EPISTLE.

DEAR MR. EDITOR,

I WANT to be a poet but my family is against it. I am not understood, Mr. Editor; and though I have very considerable affection for my family, yet I cannot hide from myself the painful fact that they are essentially practical people. There is no inspiration about them, no glow of soul, no outpouring of noble thought; they do their duty and that is all. You can understand therefore my position. I have read poetry to them by the hour, more especially my own unpublished manuscripts, but without making the slightest impression, except some yawning after a time, and the very sound of a yawn, so different from a sigh, is at all times distressing, and thoroughly unpoetical.

My father has nine children, and he says that that is enough to make any man practical, and that it will not do to sit still and be idle with so many mouths to feed. Now I do not see why we should be always thinking of mouths. There is always dinner enough. Of course every body must dine, and the less thought about the matter the better; eating can never be made interesting. I am not at all fond of butchers, though my father often says their bills must be attended to. I dare say he is right, for I am not at all practical myself. He says too that as there are nine of us, we ought to bestir ourselves, while I have no idea of being hurried, and any exertion is out of the question with my health. We ought never to be hot or hurried. Cooks, they tell me, are hot; and that is enough at once to condemn the state of heat as a vulgar and servile thing. I am not strong, and the doctor says that "the midnight lamp," which of course I am obliged to burn, if I am to write any poetry at all, is not good for my health. I like also to have time to myself, time for a kind of idle thought, leisurely musings, which I think they call contemplation. I have rather a passion for contemplation; it is so nice to sit by one's window, with one's work laid aside, and to think and think, and to dream and dream. As for this work-work-work, I hear so much of,