can he be congratulated on his answer to the above-mentioned objection. Of Thackeray's wishes he is fully aware, but some private inspiration teaches him that the tradition is only founded on a popular rumour-that his daughters interpreted this remark too literally'-that, even assuming the story to be true,' Mr. Melville cannot think Thackeray wished the story of his life to remain unwritten.' We can hardly accept all this on Mr. Melville's ipse dixit, when we have before our eyes no mere popular rumour,' but a plain sentence in the little preface to Mrs. Ritchie's Introductions. My father,' she

says, 'did not wish a biography of himself to be written.'

It is certainly refreshing to turn to these Introductions, and we wish they were not inseparable from the new edition of Thackeray's works. They are not a biography-in the circumstances they could not be one-but they are a Life. We must not expect from them a history of events in chronological order the scheme of the edition precludes this, each novel being prefaced by an account of the associations belonging to it, and of the circumstances in which it was written. But we get something better than chronology-a breathing picture. The freshness of Mrs. Ritchie's portraiture obliterates the thirty-six years since her father's death; he is in the next room the whole time she is writing. And she conveys this impression of him by those little touches at once delicate and vivid which are her special gift; by that loving insight which belongs as much to her genius as to her relationship.

Mrs. Ritchie possesses-it is almost trite to say it-that mysterious thing called Style. This is not surprising, for with her we have something of her father still among us. The breadth and tenderness of judgment which distinguished him are hers also, by nature and not by imitation. The tenderness in him made the woman in the man-an attribute of all great imaginative writers; the breadth in her strengthens the woman. Besides, she has inherited his humour, a quality rare among her sex. There is a passage of Mrs. Ritchie's own about different kinds of people, which seems almost as applicable to different kinds of style. Besides people's being and appearance,' she says in her Introduction to the Christmas Books,''there is also the difference of impression which they create. Some people come into a room with a rustling and a sound of footsteps, of opening doors; their names are announced, their entrance is an event more or less agreeable. There are others who seem to be there, or to have been there always, . . . . and I think these are perhaps among the best-loved companions of life.' It may surely be said that many of Mrs. Ritchie's books are like these

sweet and beloved presences; and the passage in which she describes them is characteristic of her style.

Among her most life-like sketches are those of her father when he was writing. In 1853 he was travelling abroad and working at the Newcomes' all the time.

'On one occasion,' she says, 'he was at work in some room in which he slept, high up in a hotel-the windows looked out upon a wide and pleasant prospect, but I cannot put a name to my remembrance; and then he walked up and down; he paused, and then he paced the room again, stopping at last at the foot of the bed, where he stood rolling his hand over the brass ball at the end of the bedstead. He was at the moment dictating that scene in which poor Jack Belsize pours out his story to Clive and J. J. at Baden. "Yes," father said, with a sort of laugh, looking down at his own hand (he was very much excited at the moment); "this is just the sort of thing a man might do at such a time."

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And again later on :—

'I remember writing. . . to my father's dictation. I wrote on as he dictated, more and more slowly until he stopped short altogether, in the account of Colonel Newcome's last illness, when he said that he must now take the pen into his own hand, and he sent me away.'

Equally vivid is the impression of Thackeray at a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream,' which his daughter remembers seeing with him

in the front row of the stalls. . . . And as the scenes succeeded one another, and as one after another of the actors stood by the footlights, droning their parts in turn, suddenly he lost all heart and patience. "Don't murder it; oh, don't murder it!" he cried aloud to one of the poor astonished fairies, who stared in amazement.'

With children and with the humble folk of life he was always at his best—at his gayest and his tenderest. He used to say that perhaps on the whole the most charming thing in the world was a little girl of two years old. Of a little boy he wrote: 'Your heart would have melted over a little boy of two last night, strolling round the Christmas tree. He looked like a little cherub just peeping into heaven; and he didn't like even to take away his own share of toys from the general splendour.' 'Pray God! he exclaims elsewhere, I may be able some day to write something good for children. That will be better than glory or Parliament.' Mrs. Ritchie tells us how this something good was written.

'It was,' she says, for a children's party in Rome that the pictures of "The Rose and the Ring" were drawn. It was just after the New Year. We wanted Twelfth Night characters, and we asked

my father to draw them. The pictures were to be shaken up in a lottery. We had prizes and cream-tarts from Spillman's, the pastrycook down below-those cream-tarts for which Lockhart had so great a fancy. My father drew the King for us, the Queen, Prince Giglio, the Prime Minister, Madam Gruffanuff. The little painted figures remained lying on the table after the children were gone, and as he came up and looked at them, he began placing them in order and making a story to fit them. One or two other sketches which he had already made were added; among them was a picture of a lovely Miss Baliol going to a ball, who was now turned into a princess. Then the gold pen began writing down the history of this fairycourt.'

As we turn over Mrs. Ritchie's pages the number we should like to transcribe becomes tantalising. One more, from the Introduction to the Roundabout Papers,' seems to come naturally after the last, for it is about an old school-girl of ninety':

'One of the last "Roundabouts" is called "On some Carp at Sans Souci," but all the same it is dated from Kensington. My father had taken a fancy to a little old woman who used to come sometimes to tea at Palace Green, and he made her the heroine of this particular paper. A friend who discovered her in a workhouse used to carry her some occasional tokens of good-will. "Ah, you rich people!" says the old lady," you are never without a screw of snuff in your pockets." The old woman used to come to tea and chatter away to my father when she met him in the hall; she curtseyed with equal deference to the page-boy, who treated her with more haughtiness perhaps. Our page-boy had serious views and doubts about her way of life. "John," says the Roundabout Paper, "when GoodyTwo-Shoes comes next Friday, I desire she may not be disturbed by theological controversies. Make her comfortable by our kitchen-hearth, set that old kettle to sing by our hob, warm her old stomach with nut-brown ale and a toast in the fire. Be kind to the poor old school-girl of ninety, who has had leave to come out for a day of Christmas holiday."'

The whole of Thackeray-the Thackeray we love-schoolboy, philosopher, fellow-man and humorist, seems to lie in that last sentence.

Besides giving us her own charming descriptions, Mrs. Ritchie lets her father tell his story himself in his journals and letters a real addition to the moral as well as the literary wealth of the world. It is almost impossible for any biography of a great man to be written without some statement concerning his religious views, and Mr. Melville's chapter on 'Thackeray as a Man' contains some well-felt writing, besides some beautiful quotations from Thackeray on the subject. But, like other Vol. 191.-No. 381.

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biographers of other men, he makes the mistake of trying to smooth the picture and turn it into the portrait of a bishop, instead of a Thackeray. He seems to be constantly asking himself 'What will clergymen think?' instead of 'What did Thackeray think?' The desire to prove that leading minds believe a great deal, and thus to give fresh confidence to a tired and vacillating world, is a natural and even a lovable one; but it is unsafe and misleading, and, in a case like Thackeray's, superfluous, for his manly, hopeful letters tell us all that can honestly be told. Whoever will read these in his daughter's Introductions to 'The Newcomes' and 'Esmond' will get a pretty complete notion of Thackeray's inner life, and there are others of a like nature scattered throughout the prefaces. The publication of these letters is, we feel, a charity to daily life, and the more they are known the better, especially as, strangely enough, this deeper side of him has been little dwelt on by those who have written about him.

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Reverence, humility, charity were the Thackeray's creed-the only dogmas he inculcated. naturally to his children that he preached most tenderly about them; and the following letter was written to the elder of the two, when they were living in Paris with their grandmother, who held Evangelical views:

'MY DEAREST A

I should read all the books that granny wishes, if I were you; and you must come to your own deductions about them, as every honest man and woman must and does. . . . I have not looked into half-a-dozen books of the French modern reformed Churchmen, but those I have seen are odious to me. D'Aubigné, I believe, is the best man of the modern French Reformers; and a worse guide to historical truth (for one who has a reputation) I don't know. If M. Gossaint argues that, because our Lord quoted the Hebrew Scriptures, therefore the Scriptures are of direct Divine composition, you may make yourself quite easy; and the works of a reasoner who would maintain an argument so monstrous need not, I should think, occupy a great portion of your time. Our Lord not only quoted the Hebrew writings (drawing illustrations from everything familiar to the people among whom He taught, from their books poetic and historic, from the landscape round about, from the flowers, the children, and the beautiful works of God), but He contradicted the Old Scriptures flatly; told the people that He brought them a new commandment-and that new commandment was not a complement, but a contradiction of the old-a repeal of a bad unjust law in their statute-books, which He would suffer to remain there no more. . . And if such and such a commandment delivered by Moses was wrong, depend on it, it was not delivered by God, and

...

the whole question of complete inspiration goes at once. . . . To my mind Scripture only means a writing, and Bible means a book. It contains Divine truths, and the history of a Divine Character; but imperfect, but not containing a thousandth part of Him; and it would be an untruth before God were I to hide my feelings from my dearest children, as it would be a sin if, having other opinions, and believing literally in the Mosaic writings, in the six days' cosmogony, in the serpent and apple and consequent damnation of the human race, I should hide them and not try to make those I loved best adopt opinions of such immense importance to them. And so God bless my darlings, and teach us the truth. Every one of us in every fact, book, circumstance of life sees a different meaning and moral, and so it must be about religion. But we can all love each other, and say, "Our Father."

A kind of loving good sense is characteristic of all Thackeray's religion. It illuminates his letters to his mother—and never surely did anyone contrive as he did to agree in spirit, and to disagree in opinion with one so close to him. Towards the end of his life he wrote to her:

A brick may have knocked a just man's brains out, a beam fallen so as to protect a scoundrel who happened to be standing under. The bricks and beams fell according to the laws which regulate bricks in tumbling. So with our diseases-we die because we are born, we decay because we grow. I have a right to say, "O Father, give me submission to bear cheerfully (if possible) and patiently my sufferings"; but I can't request any special change in my behalf from the ordinary processes, or see any special Divine animus superintending my illnesses and wellnesses. Those people seem to me presumptuous who are for ever dragging the Awful Divinity into a participation with their private concerns. . . . Yonder on my table in the next room is a number of the "Earthen Vessel." Brother Jones writes of Brother Brown how preciously he has been dealt with. Brown has been blessed by an illness; he has had the blessing of getting better; he has relapsed, and finally has the blessing of being called out of the world altogether. I don't differ with Brown essentially-only in the compliments, as it were, which he thinks it is proper to be for ever paying. I am well: Amen. I am ill: Amen. I die: Amen always. I can't say that having a tooth out is a blessing-is a punishment for my sins. I say it's having a tooth out.'

After letters like these, nothing further need be said of Thackeray's gentleness towards other beliefs than his own. The Roman Catholic faith alone excited his anger. He thought its symbols puerile and its spirit false, and could not bear the notion of asceticism—or indeed any idea which tended to make

*Introduction to Esmond,' p. xxiv.