misadventure; from some of which we would infer that the break-down of the journal was attended with circumstances more unpleasant than mere literary failure. Mr. Adolphus Simcoe (Punch, vol. iii.), when in a bad way from a love of literature and drink, completed his ruin by purchasing and conducting for six months that celebrated miscellany called the Lady's Lute, after which time "its chords were rudely snapped asunder, and he who had swept them aside with such joy went forth a wretched and heart-broken man." And in Lovel the Widower, Mr. Batchelor narrates similar experiences :-

"I daresay I gave myself airs as editor of that confounded Museum, and proposed to educate the public taste, to diffuse morality and sound literature throughout the nation, and to pocket a liberal salary in return for my services. I daresay I printed my own sonnets, my own tragedy, my own verses (to a being who shall be nameless, but whose conduct has caused a faithful heart to bleed not a little). I daresay I wrote satirical articles, in which I piqued myself on the fineness of my wit and criticisms, got up for the nonce, out of encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries; so that I would be actually astonished at my own knowledge. I daresay I made a gaby of myself to the world; pray, my good friend, hast thou never done likewise? If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man."

Silence for a while seems to have followed upon this failure; but in 1836 his first attempt at independent authorship appeared simultaneously at London and Paris. This publication, at a time when he still hoped to make his bread by art, is, like indeed everything he either said or did, so characteristic, and has been so utterly forgotten, that an account of it may not be out of place, perhaps more minute than its absolute merits deserve.

It is a small folio, with six lithographs, slightly tinted, entitled Flore et Zephyr, Ballet Mythologique dédié à par Théophile Wagstaffe. Between "à" and "par" on the cover is the exquisite Flore herself, all alone in some rosy and bedizened bower. She has the old jaded smirk, and, with eyebrows up and eyelids dropt, she is looking down oppressed with modesty and glory. Her nose, which is long, and has a ripe droop, gives to the semicircular smirk of the large mouth, down upon the centre of which it comes in the funniest way, an in

1 The portrait of Mr. Adolphus, stretched out, "careless diffused,"-seedy, hungry, and diabolical, in his fashionable cheap hat, his dirty white duck trowsers strapped tightly down, as being the mode and possibly to conceal his bare legs; a half-smoked, probably unsmokeably bad cigar, in his hand, which is lying over the arm of a tavern bench, from whence he is casting a greedy and ruffian eye upon some unseen fellows, supping plenteously and with cheer,—is, for power and drawing, not unworthy of Hogarth.

describably sentimental absurdity. Her thin, sinewy arms and large hands are crossed on her breast, and her petticoat stands out like an inverted white tulip of muslin-out of which come her professional legs, in the only position which human nature never puts its legs into; it is her special pose. Of course, also, you are aware, by that smirk, that look of being looked at, that though alone in maiden meditation in this her bower, and sighing for her Zephyr, she is in front of some thousand pairs of eyes, and under the fire of many double-barrelled lorgnettes, of which she is the focus.

In the first plate, La Danse fait ses offrandes sur l'autel de l'harmonie, in the shapes of Flore and Zephyr coming trippingly to the footlights, and paying no manner of regard to the altar of harmony, represented by a fiddle with an old and dreary face, and a laurel wreath on its head, and very great regard to the unseen but perfectly understood "house." Next is Triste et abattu, les séductions des Nymphes le (Zephyr) tentent en vain, Zephyr looking theatrically sad. Then Flore (with one lower extremity at more than a right angle to the other) déplore l'absence de Zephyr. The man in the orchestra endeavouring to combine business with pleasure, so as to play the flageolet and read his score, and at the same time miss nothing of the deploring, is intensely comic. Next Zephyr has his turn, and dans un pas seul exprime sa suprême désespoir the extremity of despair being expressed by doubling one leg so as to touch the knee of the other, and then whirling round so as to suggest the regulator of a steam-engine run off. Next is the rapturous reconciliation, when the faithful creature bounds into his arms, and is held up to the house by the waist in the wonted fashion. Then there is La Retraite de Flore, where we find her with her mother and two admirers-Zephyr, of course, not one. This is in Thackeray's strong unflinching line. One lover is a young dandy without forehead or chin, sitting idiotically astride his chair. To him the old lady, who has her slight rouge, too, and is in a homely shawl and muff, having walked, is making faded love. In the centre is the fair darling herself still on tiptoe, and wrapped up, but not too much, for her fiacre. With his back to the comfortable fire, and staring wickedly at her, is the other lover, a big, burly, elderly man, probably well to do on the Bourse, and with a wife and family at home in their beds. The last exhibits Les délassements de Zephyr. That hard-working and homely personage is resting his arm on the chimney-piece, taking a huge pinch of snuff from the box of a friend, with a refreshing expression of satisfaction, the only bit of nature as yet. A dear little innocent pot-boy, such as only Thackeray knew how to draw, is gazing and waiting upon

the two, holding up a tray from the nearest tavern, on which is a great pewter-pot of foaming porter for Zephyr, and a rummer of steaming brandy and water for his friend, who has come in from the cold air. These drawings are lithographed by Edward Morton, son of "Speed the Plough," and are done with that delicate strength and truth for which this excellent but little known artist is always to be praised. In each corner is the monogram, which appears so often afterwards with the M added, and is itself superseded by the well-known pair of spectacles. Thackeray must have been barely five-and-twenty when this was published by Mitchell in Bond Street. It can hardly be said to have sold.

Now it is worth noticing how in this, as always, he ridiculed the ugly and the absurd in truth and pureness. There is, as we may well know, much that is wicked (though not so much as the judging community are apt to think) and miserable in such a life. There is much that a young man and artist might have felt and drawn in depicting it, of which in after years he would be ashamed; but "Théophile Wagstaffe" has done nothing of this. The effect of looking over these juvenilia -these first shafts from that mighty bow, now, alas! unbentis good, is moral; you are sorry for the hard-wrought slaves; perhaps a little contemptuous towards the idle people who go to see them; and you feel, moreover, that the Ballet, as thus done, is ugly as well as bad, is stupid as well as destructive of decency.

His dream of editorship being ended, Mr. Thackeray thenceforward contented himself with the more lowly, but less responsible, position of a contributor, especially to Fraser's Magazine. The youth of Fraser was full of vigour and genius. We know no better reading than its early volumes, unsparing indeed, but brilliant with scholarship and originality and fire. In these days, the staff of that periodical included such men as Maginn, "Barry Cornwall," Coleridge, Carlyle, Hogg, Galt, Theodore Hook, Delta, Gleig, Edward Irving, and, now foremost of them all, Thackeray. The first of the Yellowplush Correspondence appeared in November 1837. The world should be grateful to Mr. John Henry Skelton, who in that year wrote a book called My Book, or the Anatomy of Conduct, for to him is owing the existence of Mr. Charles Yellowplush as a critic, and as a narrator of "fashnable fax and polite annygoats." Mr. Yellowplush, on reading Mr. Skelton's book, saw at once that only a gentleman of his distinguished profession could competently criticise the same; and this was soon succeeded by the wider conviction that the great subject of fashionable life should

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not be left to any common writin creatures," but that an authentic picture thereof must be supplied by "ONE OF US." In the words of a note to the first paper, with the initials O. Y., but which it is easy to recognise as the work of Mr. Charles himself without the plush:-"He who looketh from a tower sees more of the battle than the knights and captains engaged in it; and, in like manner, he who stands behind a fashionable table knows more of society than the guests who sit at the board. It is from this source that our great novel-writers have drawn their experience, retailing the truths which they learned. It is not impossible that Mr. Yellowplush may continue his communications, when we shall be able to present the reader with the only authentic picture of fashionable life which has been given to the world in our time." The idea was not carried out very fully. The only pictures sketched by Mr. Yellowplush were the farce of "Miss Shum's Husband," and the terrible tragedy of "Deuceace," neither of them exactly "pictures of fashionable life." We rather fancy that, in the story of Mr. Deuceace, Mr. Yellowplush was carried away from his original plan, a return to which he found impossible after that wonderful medley of rascality, grim humour, and unrelieved bedevilry of all kinds. But in 1838 he reverted to his original critical tendencies, and demolished all that The Quarterly had left of a book which made some noise in its day, called A Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth; and wrote from his pantry one of the "Epistles to the Literati," expressing his views of Sir Edward Lytton's Sea Captain, than which we know of no more good-natured, trenchant, and conclusive piece of criticism. All the Yellowplush papers except the first are republished in the Miscellanies.

In 1839, appeared the story of Catherine, by Ikey Solomon. This story is little known, and it throws us back upon one still less known. In 1832, when Mr. Thackeray was not more than twenty-one, Elisabeth Brownrigge: a tale, was narrated in the August and September numbers of Fraser. This tale is dedicated to the author of Eugene Aram, and the author describes himself as a young man who has for a length of time applied himself to literature, but entirely failed in deriving any emoluments from his exertions. Depressed by failure he sends for the popular novel of Eugene Aram to gain instruction therefrom. He soon discovers his mistake:

"From the frequent perusal of older works of imagination I had learnt so to weave the incidents of my story as to interest the feelings of the reader in favour of virtue, and to increase his detestation of vice. I have been taught by Eugene Aram to mix vice and virtue up together in such an inextricable confusion as to render it impossible

"Elisabeth Brownrigge."

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that any preference should be given to either, or that the one, indeed, should be at all distinguishable from the other. . . . In taking my subject from that walk of life to which you had directed my attention, many motives conspired to fix my choice on the heroine of the ensuing tale; she is a classic personage,her name has been already 'linked to immortal verse' by the muse of Canning. Besides, it is extraordinary that, as you had commenced a tragedy under the title of Eugene Aram, I had already sketched a burletta with the title of Elisabeth Brownrigge. I had, indeed, in my dramatic piece, been guilty of an egregious and unpardonable error: I had attempted to excite the sympathies of the audience in favour of the murdered apprentices, but your novel has disabused me of so vulgar a prejudice, and, in my present version of her case, all the interest of the reader and all the pathetic powers of the author will be engaged on the side of the murderess.".

According to this conception the tale proceeds, with incidents and even names taken directly from the Newgate Calendar, but rivalling Eugene Aram itself in magnificence of diction, absurdity of sentiment, and pomp of Greek quotation. The trial scene and the speech for the defence are especially well hit off. If Elisabeth Brownrigge was written by Thackeray, and the internal evidence seems to us strong, the following is surprising criticism from a youth of twenty-one-the very Byron and Bulwer age:

"I am inclined to regard you (the author of Eugene Aram) as an original discoverer in the world of literary enterprise, and to reverence you as the father of a new 'lusus naturæ school.' There is no other title by which your manner could be so aptly designated. I am told, for instance, that in a former work, having to paint an adulterer, you described him as belonging to the class of country curates, among whom, perhaps, such a criminal is not met with once in a hundred years; while, on the contrary, being in search of a tender-hearted, generous, sentimental, high-minded hero of romance, you turned to the pages of the Newgate Calendar, and looked for him in the list of men who have cut throats for money, among whom a person in possession of such qualities could never have been met with at all. Wanting a shrewd, selfish, worldly, calculating valet, you describe him as an old soldier, though he bears not a single trait of the character which might have been moulded by a long course of military service, but, on the contrary, is marked by all the distinguishing features of a bankrupt attorney, or a lame duck from the Stock Exchange. Having to paint a cat, you endow her with the idiosyncrasies of a dog."

At the end, the author intimates that he is ready to treat with any liberal publisher for a series of works in the same style, to be called Tales of the Old Bailey, or Romances of Tyburn Tree. The proposed series is represented only by Catherine, a longer