by means of his tail, which is wound round Sir Roger's neck. The idea of this tale is characteristic. The venerable knight, already in the other world, has made a foolish bet with the Devil involving very seriously his future prospects there, which he can only win by persuading some of his relatives on earth to say an Ave for him. He fails to obtain this slight boon from a kinsman successor for obvious reasons; and from a beloved niece, owing to a musical lover whose serenading quite puts a stop to her devotional exercises; and succeeds at last, only when, giving up all hope from compassion or generosity, he appeals by a pious fraud to the selfishness of a brother and a monk. The story ends with a very Thackerean touch : "The moral of this story will be given in several successive numbers; " the last three words are in the SketchBook changed into "the second edition." Perhaps best of all is a portrait of Louis Philippe, presenting the Citizen King under the Robert Macaire aspect, the adoption and popularity of which Thackeray so carefully explains and illustrates in his Essay on Caricatures and Lithography in Paris." Below the portrait are these lines, not themselves very remarkable, but in which, especially in the allusion to Snobs by the destined enemy of the race, we catch glimpses of the future : "Like 'the king in the parlor' he 's fumbling his money, Of his wonderful feats at Fleurus and Jemappe ; No huzzas greet his coming, no patriot club licks He stands in Paris, as you see him before ye, Little more than a snob. That 's an end of the story." The journal seems to have been an attempt to substitute vigorous and honest criticism of books and of art for the partiality and slipslop general then, and now not perhaps quite unknown. It failed, however, partly, it may be, from the inexperience of its managers, but doubtless still more from the want of the capital necessary to establish anything of the sort in the face of similar journals of old standing. People get into a habit of taking certain periodicals unconsciously, as they take snuff. The "National Standard," etc., etc., came into existence on the 5th January, 1833, and ceased to be on the 1st February, 1834. His subsequent writings contain several allusions to this misadventure; from some of which we would infer that the breakdown of the journal was attended with circumstances more unpleasant than mere literary failure. Mr. Adolphus Simcoe 1 ("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 dare say 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 dare say 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 dare say 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 dare say I made a gaby of myself to the world; pray, my good friend, hast 1 The portrait of Mr. Adolphus, stretched out, "careless diffused," seedy, hungry, and diabolical, in his fashionable cheap hat, his dirty white duck trousers strapped tightly down, as being the mode and possibly to conceal his bare legs; a half-smoked, probably unsmokably 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. 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 de serve. 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 indescribably 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 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. out 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 endeavoring 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 steamengine 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-andtwenty 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! unbent -is 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 vigor 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 among the greatest 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 |