his auger with such pertinacity that we were all bored nearly to distraction. I dared not look at Thackeray, but I felt that his eye was upon me. My distress may be imagined when he got up quite deliberately from the prominent place where a chair had been set for him, and made his exit very noiselessly into a small anteroom leading into the larger room, and in which no one was sitting. The small apartment was dimly lighted, but he knew that I knew he was there. Then commenced a series of pantomimic feats impossible to describe adequately. He threw an imaginary person (myself, of course) upon the floor, and proceeded to stab him several times with a paper-folder, which he caught up for the purpose. After disposing of his victim in this way, he was not satisfied, for the dull lecture still went on in the other room, and he fired an imaginary revolver several times at an imaginary head. Still the droning speaker proceeded with his frozen subject (it was something about the Arctic regions, if I remember rightly), and now began the greatest pantomimic scene of all, namely, murder by poison, after the manner in which the player king is disposed of in "Hamlet." Thackeray had found a small vial on the mantelshelf, and out of that he proceeded to pour the imaginary "juice of cursed hebenon" into the imaginary porches of somebody's ears. The whole thing was inimitably done, and I hoped nobody saw it but myself; but years afterwards, a ponderous, fat-witted young man put the question squarely to me, "What was the matter with Mr. Thackeray that night the club met at Mr. -'s house?"

I parted with Thackeray for the last time in the street, at midnight, in London, a few months before his death. The Cornhill Magazine, under his editorship, having proved a very great success, grand dinners were given every month in honor of the new venture. We had been sitting late at one of these festivals, and, as it was getting toward morning, I thought it wise, as far as I was concerned, to be moving homeward before the sun rose. Seeing my intention to withdraw, he insisted on driving me in his brougham to my lodgings. When we reached the outside door of our host, Thackeray's servant, seeing a stranger with his master, touched his hat and asked where he should drive us. It was then between one and two o'clock, time certainly for all decent diners-out to be at rest. Thackeray put on one of his most quizzical expressions, and said to John, in answer to his question, "I think we will make a morning

call on the Lord Bishop of London." John knew his master's quips and cranks too well to suppose he was in earnest, so I gave him my address, and we went on. When we reached my lodgings the clocks were striking two, and the early morning air was raw and piercing. Opposing all my entreaties for leave-taking in the carriage, he insisted upon getting out on the sidewalk and escorting me up to my door, saying, with a mockheroic protest to the heavens above us, "That it would be shameful for a full-blooded Britisher to leave an unprotected Yankee friend exposed to ruffians who prowl about the streets with an eye to plunder." Then giving me a gigantic embrace, he sang a verse of which he knew me to be very fond; and so vanished out of my sight the great-hearted author of "Pendennis" and "Vanity Fair." But I think of him still as moving, in his own stately way, up and down the crowded thoroughfares of London, dropping in at the Garrick, or sitting at the window of the Athenæum Club and watching the stupendous tide of life that is ever moving past in that wonderful city.

Thackeray was a master in every sense, having as it were, in himself, a double quantity of being. Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated so strangely in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son of Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin brother of the Stratford Seer. There was nothing in him amorphous and unconsidered. Whatever he chose to do was always perfectly done. There was a genuine Thackeray flavor in everything he was willing to say or to write. He detected with unfailing skill the good or the vile wherever it existed. He had an unerring eye, a firm understanding, and abounding truth. "Two of his great master powers," said the chairman at a dinner given to him many years ago in Edinburgh, "are satire and sympathy." George Brimley remarked "that he could not have painted 'Vanity Fair' as he has, unless Eden had been shining in his inner eye." He had, indeed, an awful insight, with a world of solemn tenderness and simplicity, in his composition. Those who heard the same voice that withered the memory of King George the Fourth repeat "The spacious firmament on high," have a recollection not easily to be blotted from the mind, and I have a kind of pity for all who were born so recently as not to have heard and understood Thackeray's Lectures. But they can read him, and I beg of them to try and appreciate the tenderer phase of his genius, as well as the sarcastic one. He teaches

many lessons to young men, and here is one of them, which I quote memoriter from "Barry Lyndon": "Do you not, as a boy, remember waking of bright summer mornings and finding your mother looking over you? had not the gaze of her tender eyes stolen into your senses long before you woke, and cast over your slumbering spirit a sweet spell of peace, and love, and fresh-springing joy?" My dear friend, John Brown, of Edinburgh (whom may God long preserve to both countries where he is so loved and honored), chronicles this touching incident. "We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December, when Thackeray was walking with two friends along the Dean Road, to the west of Edinburgh, — one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening; such a sunset as one never forgets; a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color, lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness, every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the granary below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, Thackeray gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice to what all were feeling, in the word, 'CALVARY!' The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things, - of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation, expressing his simple faith in God and in his Savior."

Thackeray was found dead in his bed on Christmas morning, and he probably died without pain. His mother and his daughters were sleeping under the same roof when he passed away alone. Dickens told me that, looking on him as he lay in his coffin, he wondered that the figure he had known in life as one of such noble presence could seem so shrunken and wasted; but there had been years of sorrow, years of labor, years of pain, in that now exhausted life. It was his happiest Christmas morning when he heard the Voice calling him homeward to unbroken rest.

THE ECHO CLUB.1

BY BAYARD TAYLOR.

[BAYARD TAYLOR: An American author and traveler; born at Kennett Square, Chester County, Pa., January 11, 1825; died in Berlin, Germany, December 19, 1878. He left home at the age of nineteen, took a cheap passage across the ocean, and supported himself in Europe by writing letters to American journals. The result of this journey was his first book, "Views Afoot" (1846), which at once gave him distinction. He spent the greater part of his life in travel, finding abundant material for his books and lectures. He was secretary of legation at St. Petersburg in 1862-1863, and in 1878 was appointed minister plenipotentiary to Germany, but died after holding the office a few months. Among his prose works are: "El Dorado" (1850), "Journey to Central Africa" and "The Lands of the Saracen" (1854), "Visit to India, China, and Japan" (1855), "Northern Travel" (1858), and "Travels in Greece and Russia" (1859). His poetical works include: "Rhymes of Travel" (1848), "Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs " (1851), "Poems of the Orient " (1854), "Poems of Home and Travel" (1855)," The Masque of the Gods" (1872), “Lars" (1873), "The Prophet" (1874), “Home Pastorals" (1875), and the "Prince Deukalion" (1878). He also wrote two novels, "Hannah Thurston" (1863) and "The Story of Kennett" (1866), and made a translation of Goethe's "Faust."]

NIGHT THE SECOND.

THE friends came together again in the Lions' Den a little earlier than their wont; but they did not immediately take up the chief diversion of the evening. In intellectual, as in physical acrobatics, the joints must be gradually made flexible, and the muscles warm and elastic, by lighter feats; so the conversation began as mere skylarking and mutual chaffing, as empty and evanescent, when you attempt to catch it, as the foam ripples on a swift stream. But Galahad had something on his mind; he had again read portions of the "Earthly Paradise," and insisted that the atmosphere of the poems was not gray and overcast, but charged with a golden, luminous mist, like that of the Indian summer. Finally, he asked the Ancient : Granting the force of your impression, might not much of it come from some want of harmony between your mood or temper of mind and the author's? In that case, it would not be abstractly just."

66

The Ancient-I don't think that we often can be "abstractly just" towards contemporary poets; we either exalt or abase

1 Copyright, 1895, by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Used by permission,

them too much. For we and they breathe either the same or opposite currents in the intellectual atmosphere of the time, and there can be no impartial estimate until those winds have blown over. This is precisely the reason why you sometimes think me indifferent, when I am only trying to shove myself as far off as the next generation; at least, to get a little outside of the fashions and whims and prejudices of this day. American authors, and also their publishers, are often charged with an overconcern for the opinion of the English literary journals. I think their interest quite natural

Zoïlus [with energy] - Now, you surely are not going to justify that sycophantic respect for the judgment of men who know so much less than we do of our own literature?

The Ancient-I condemn all sycophancy, even to the great, triumphant, overwhelming American spirit! But, until we have literary criticism of a more purely objective character in this country, until our critics learn to separate their personal tastes and theories from their estimate of the executive and artistic quality of the author; or, which amounts to the same thing, to set this quality, this creative principle, higher than the range of themes and opinions, the author will look to the judgment of critics, whose distance and whose very want of acquaintance with our prejudices and passions assure him of a certain amount of impartiality. The feeling is reciprocal; I venture to say that an intelligent American criticism has more weight with an English author than that of one of his own Reviews.

Zoïlus - Do you mean to say that we have no genuine criticism?

The Ancient- By no means; we have some that is admirable. But it is only recognized at its true value by a very small class; the great reading public is blissfully ignorant of its existence. It adds to the confusion, that many of our writers have no definite ideas of literary excellence apart from the effect which immediately follows their work; and readers are thus actually misled by those who should guide them. Why, a year ago, the most popular book in the whole country was one which does not even belong to literature; and the most popular poem of late years was written, not from a poetic, but from a high moral, inspiration! Somebody must set up a true æsthetic standard; it is high time this were done, and a better criticism must be the first step.