world: Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a face? "Off, off ye lendings!" O God! how much wiser, as well as better, not to study how to seem, but how to be! How much wiser and better, not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who shall pluck out the heart of your mystery," and shall anatomise you, and deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and manners in Queen Victoria's reign!

In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages on character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman resents his Rebecca-inimitable Becky! no woman but feels and acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful and finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author's own words when speaking of 'Tom Jones: '-"I can't say that I think Amelia a virtuous character. I can't say but I think Mr. Thackeray's evident liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist's moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art and

ethics there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable."

Laura, in Pendennis,' is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood. She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between her and the perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from her nature. Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that first affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more manly and noble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back to Pendennis, and marrying him! Such infirmity might be true of some women, but not of such a woman as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy of the portrait.

And then Lady Castlewood, so evidently a favourite of the author, what shall we say of her? The virtuous woman, par excellence, who "never sins and never forgives," who never resents, nor relents, nor repents; the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who for years is the confidante of a man's delirious passion for her own child, and then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr. Thackeray! this will never do! such women may

exist, but to hold them up as examples of excellence, and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and proves a low standard in ethics and in art. "When an author presents to us a heroine whom we are called upon to admire, let him at least take care that she is admirable." If in these, and in some other instances, Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank him for some amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood and true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of gratitude, and a far deeper debt of gratitude left unexpressed, I close his book, and say, good night!

SOM

96.

OMETIMES, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful analogies between things apparently dissimilar-those awful approximations between things apparently far asunder-which many people would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all God's creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole; they give me, thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that over

whelming unity which we call the universe, the multitudinous ONE.

Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the Greeks, and unsurpassed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering well the characteristics which distinguish the human form from the brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was to soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity; till, at last, the human merged into the divine, and the God in look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.

Let us now suppose this broad principle which the Greeks applied to form, ethically carried out, and made the basis of all education-the training of men as a race. Suppose we started with the general axiom that all propensities which we have in common with the lower animals are to be kept subordinate, and so far as is consistent with the truth of nature refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate, all the aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are to be cultivated and rendered more and more prominent, till at last the human being, in faculties as well as form, approaches the God-like-I only say suppose?