tunity of seeing and hearing them. If Mr. Dickens, instead of dining at other people's expense, and making speeches at his own, when he came to see us, had devoted an evening or two in the week to lecturing, his purse would have been fuller, his feelings sweeter, and his fame fairer. It was a Quixotic crusade, that of the Copyright, and the excellent Don has never forgiven the windmill that broke his spear.

Undoubtedly, when it was ascertained that Mr. Thackeray was coming, the public feeling on our side of the sea was very much divided as to his probable reception. "He'll come and humbug us, eat our dinners, pocket our money, and go home and abuse us, like that unmitigated snob Dickens," said Jonathan, chafing with the remembrance of that grand ball at the Park Theatre, and the Boz tableaux, and the universal wining and dining, to which the distinguished Dickens was subject while he was our guest.

'Let him have his say," said others, "and we will have our look.. We will pay a dollar to hear him, if we can see him at the same time; and as for the abuse, why it takes even more than two such cubs of the roaring British lion to frighten the American eagle. Let him come, and give him fair play."

He did come, and has had his fair play, and has returned to England with a comfortable pot of gold holding $12,000, and with the hope and promise of seeing us again in September, to discourse of something not less entertaining than the witty men and sparkling times of Anne. We think there was no disappointment with his lectures. Those who knew his books found

the author in the lecturer. Those who did not know the books were charmed in the lecturer by what is charming in the author, the unaffected humanity, the tenderness, the sweetness, the genial play of fancy, and the sad touch of truth, with that glancing stroke of satire, which, lightning-like, illumines while it withers. The lectures were even more delightful than the books, because the tones of the voice, and the appearance of the man, the general personal magnetism, explained and alleviated so much that would otherwise have seemed doubtful or unfair. For those who had long felt in the writings of Thackeray a reality, quite inexpressible, there was a secret delight in finding it justified by his speaking. For he speaks as he writes, simply, directly, without flourish, without any cant of oratory, commending what he says by its intrinsic sense, and the sympathetic, and humane way in which it was spoken. Thackeray is the kind of "stump-orator that would have pleased Carlyle. He never thrusts himself between you and his thought.. If his conception of the time and his estimate of the men differ from your own, you have at least no doubt what his view is, nor how sincere and necessary it is to him. Mr. Thackeray considers Swift a misanthrope. He loves Goldsmith, and Steele, and Harry Fielding. He has no love for Sterne, great admiration for Pope, and alleviated admiration for Addison. How could it be otherwise? How could Thackeray not think Swift a misanthrope, and Sterne a factitious sentimentalist ? He is a man of instincts, not of thoughts. He sees and feels. He would be "Shakspeare's call-boy"

rather than dine with the Dean of St. Patrick's. He would take a pot of ale with Goldsmith rather than a glass of Burgundy with the "Reverend Mr. Sterne,'' and that, simply, because he is Thackeray. He would have done it as Fielding would have done it, because he values one genuine emotion above the most dazzling thought, because he is, in fine, a Bohemian, "a minion of the moon,' a great, sweet, generous human heart. We say this with the more unction now, that we have the personal proof of it in his public and private intercourse while he was here.

The popular Thackeray-theory, before his arrival, was of a severe satirist, who concealed scalpels in his sleeves and carried probes in his waistcoat pockets; a scoffer and sneerer, and general infidel of all high aim and noble character. Certainly we are justified in saying that his presence among us quite corrected this idea.

We conceive this to be the chief result of Thackeray's visit, that he convinced us of his intellectual integrity; he showed us how impossible it is for him to see the world, and describe it other than he does. He does not profess cynicism, nor satirize society with malice. There is no man more humble, none more simple.

There is no man who masks so little as he, in assuming the author. His books are his observations reduced to writing. It seems to us as singular to demand that Dante should be like Shakspeare, as to quarrel with Thackeray's want of what is called ideal

portraiture. Even if you thought, from reading his Vanity Fair, that he had no conception of noble women, certainly after the lecture upon Swift, after all the lectures, in which every allusion to women was so manly, and delicate, and sympathetic, you thought so no longer.

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Mr. Thackeray's success was very great. He did not visit the West, nor Canada. He went home without seeing Niagara Falls. But wherever he did go, he found a generous social welcome, and a respectful and sympathetic hearing. He came to fulfil no mission: but he certainly knit more closely our sympathy with Englishmen.

From Colburn's New Monthly. Reprinted in The Eclectic Magazine, December, 1853.

THACKERAY'S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH
HUMORISTS.

"Heroes and Hero-worship "—a subject chosen by Mr. Carlyle, when he arose to discourse before the sweet shady-sidesmen of Pall Mall and the fair of Mayfair is not all the res vexanda one would predicate for a course of lectures by Mr. Titmarsh. If the magnificence of the hero grows small by degrees and beautifully less before the microscopic scrutiny of his valet, so might it be expected to end in a minus sign, after subjection to the eliminating process of the Book of Snobs.' Yet one passage, at least, there is in the attractive volume before us, instinct with hero

worship, and, some will think, (as coming from such a quarter,) surcharged with enthusiasm,-where the lecturer affirms, "I should like to have been Shakspeare's shoeblack-just to have lived in his house, just to have worshipped him—to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet serene face."" At which sally, we can imagine nil admirari folks exclaiming, (if they be capable of an exclamation,) "Oh, you little snob!" Nevertheless, that sally will go far to propitiate many a reader hitherto steeled against the showman of “ Vanity Fair," as an inveterate cynic-however little of real ground he may have given for such a prejudice.

As with clerical sermons, so with laic lectures, there are few one pines to see in print. In the present instance, those who were of Mr. Thackeray's audience will probably, in the majority of cases, own to a sense of comparative tameness as the result of deliberate perusal. Nevertheless, the book could be ill spared, as books go. It is full of sound, healthy, manly, vigorous writing-sagacious in observation, independent and thoughtful, earnest in sentiment, in style pointed, clear, and straightforward.

If we cared to dwell upon them, we might, however, make exceptions decided if not plentiful against parts of this volume. That Mr. Thackeray can be pertinaciously one-sided was seen in his Esmond" draught of the Duke of Marlborough. A like restriction of vision seems here to distort his presentment of Sterne and of Hogarth.

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