She comes from the past and revisits my room;
She looks as she then did, all beauty and bloom;
So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,

As yonder she sits in my cane-bottom'd chair.

Thackeray has four translations of paraphrases of four of Beranger's poems that are perfect of their kind, so completely do they catch the form and spirit of the originals. I quote from “The Garret "-Beranger's "Le Grenier":

With pensive eyes the little room I view,

Where in my youth I weathered it so long,
With a wild mistress, a staunch friend or two,
And a light heart still breaking into song;
Making a mock of life and all its cares,
Rich in the glory of my rising sun,
Lightly I vaulted up four pair of stairs,

In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

Yes, 'tis a garret-let him know't who will-
There was my bed-full hard it was and small;
My table there and I decipher still

Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall.
Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away,
Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;
For you I pawned my watch how many a day,
In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

Let us begone-the place is sad and strange-
How far, far off these happy times appear;

All that I have to live I'd gladly change

For one such month as I have wasted here

To draw long dreams of beauty, love, and power,
From founts of hope that never will outrun,
And drink all life's quintessence in an hour,
Give me the days when I was twenty-one.

His more humorous poems, such as the "Ballads of Policeman X," were written for Punch and were intended to satirize the follies of the time, and even where the allusions are obscure or forgotten they are still capital reading.

Thackeray's muse was sometimes coy and uncertain, and Mrs. Ritchie says:

When my father wrote a poem he used to be more agitated than when he wrote in prose. He would come into the room worried and excited, saying: "Here are two more days wasted, I have done nothing at all. It has taken me four mornings' work to produce six lines." Then, after a further struggle, all would go well.

The first collection of Thackeray's poems was published by him when he was in the United States on his second lecturing tour. The preface is dated Boston, October 27, 1855, in which he says:

These ballads have been written during the last fifteen years, and are now gathered by the author from his own books and the various periodicals in which the pieces appear originally. They are published simultaneously in England and America, where a public which has been interested in the writer's prose stories, he hopes, may be kindly disposed to his little volume of verses.

The volume was very popular when first published, but the prose writings have so completely overshadowed the poems that they have almost been forgotten. They are well worthy of recall and scarcely inferior to his best prose. They are charming and unique.

CHARLES DICKENS.

(1812-1870.)

It is an interesting question whether after the lapse of a quarter of a century the popularity of Dickens continues or is likely to endure. We are always looking "into the seeds of time to see which grain will grow and which will not," and in nothing so much as in respect to literary fame. Will this poet live? Will the poem that everybody is reading and praising be read fifty or a hundred years from now? Will the popular novel of to-day also amuse and interest our grandchildren? Or are these only added ephemera to the mighty waste of long-forgotten things? These are always notable questions when asked about any person, but when propounded about a writer who held his own generation spellbound and was the most popular writer of his time, they are doubly so.

It is the fashion nowadays in high critical

some.

quarters to disparage Dickens. They say his pathos is pinchbeck, his humor vulgar, his incessant caricature unnatural and his mannerisms tireMr. Howells, in a fine critical essay, has declared the art of Dickens would not be tolerated in these days. Brander Matthews willingly surrenders Dickens to the scalpel of Mr. Howells, though he will fight for Thackeray to the death. There are others also who are not ashamed to

say that they cannot read Dickens.

Nevertheless the "Master" still lives, as is proved by the innumerable editions of the novels still published.

One of the criticisms most frequently heard against Dickens is his proneness to exaggeration, and that consequently his characters are out of drawing, as the artists say. They are not persons, but peculiarities, mere caricatures of humanity. And they say this is not good art. Possibly it is not, but the story is told all the same, and there is no reader but feels that the life-blood is pulsing through the veins of every one of Dickens' creations. Mr. Wilkins Micawber or Mr. Newman Noggs are undoubtedly exaggerations, and perhaps one does not meet them in real life, but how alive they are, for all that!

Nor do they seem like exaggerations on the