'The Virginians' thus takes its place beside Esmond' as one of Mr. Thackeray's historical novels, which stand contrasted with his novels in the proper sense somewhat as Shakspeare's 'his'tories' do with his other dramas.

We have, however, remarked in a previous notice of Mr. Thackeray's works that Shakspeare does not lay upon himself in his histories' the burden which Mr. Thackeray lays upon himself in his historical novels. He does not really undertake the task of reproducing the life, thoughts, manners, and costume of a past age. His Theseus is in reality a 'duke,' and the Athens of his Theseus is a dukedom, of the poet's own time, to which the whole of the action, sentiments, and personages clearly belong. The scene of his Macbeth,' in like manner, lies really not in the cold and raw twilight which preceded the dawn of Scottish history, but in an age of stately, though criminal ambition playing for a great and dazzling prize; an age, in short, such as was just coming to a close in Shakspeare's time. This remark has recently received a curious illustration in the representations of the Midsummer Night's Dream,' and' Macbeth,' at the Princess's Theatre, under the management of Mr. Charles Kean, of whom as a benefactor to the English drama we desire to speak with all honour. Both the plays were got up with the minutest attention to the costume and scenery of their nominal epoch; and the result only showed how far such antiquarianism was from the poet's thoughts. Nothing could be more incongruous than the mixture of the classical Theseus, his classical queen and their classical court, and of the Greek costume and scenery generally, with the fairy mythology of the middle ages, and with Bottom and his most unclassical crew. The want of keeping between the picture of ancient Greek life and the chivalrous loves of the knights and ladies was less obvious but quite as great. You had a Greek father determining to send his daughter into a nunnery because she wanted to marry the gallant of her choice; and Demetrius and Lysander went out to fight a duel (a thing utterly alien to Greek antiquity), with short Greek swords, but without shields. In Macbeth the royal palace (reproduced, we have no doubt, with all attainable fidelity) was little better than a hovel; and the splendid prize which seduced Macbeth's loyalty, and to which Lady Macbeth's grand wickedness aspired, the summit of ambition which earth and hell were stirred to reach, was to sit upon a three-legged stool and eat crab-apples for supper. The guilty thane might have bought of an apple-woman for sixpence his royal banquet, without the avenging ghost. Mr. Kean argues that ambition animates alike the breast of the savage and

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of the civilised man; but will he find in the heart or on the lips of a savage such ambition as that of Lady Macbeth?

To write a novel, laying the scene in a past age, and preserving the character of that age, is indeed a Herculean task. It requires a double effort of the imagination, the difficulty of which is a great deal more than double that of the single effort. To accomplish it successfully, the imaginative faculty must, as it were, be raised to the second power. First, the writer has to present to himself vividly the age he seeks to depict, to place himself mentally in it, and see everything as it was in that age; and, secondly, he has to create imaginary characters, and throw himself into them in the way necessary to give imaginary characters consistency and life. You may almost count on your fingers the men who have been able to do either of these things separately, and to do them both together is, we believe, a feat of which there is no example. Besides, the necessity of preserving antiquarian correctness must keep the critical judgment of the writer always in a state of vigilance incompatible with the intense and unshackled exertion of the creative imagination. How can even a Thackeray live, think, speak, and move in the creatures of his fancy, when he has at the same time to be asking himself whether every thought, speech, motion, and each of the surrounding circumstances, is in accordance with what we know of the lives of men of fashion, soldiers, and play writers of the time of George II.?

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There is, indeed, a kind of antiquarian rather than historical novel, which can scarcely be named in connexion with Mr. Thackeray's works, but which is sometimes successful in its small way. We mean such books as Bekker's Charicles and Gallus,' where the sole object is to 'cram' us with antiquities, and the characters and incidents are only so many pegs whereon the contents of Adams and Potter may be hung. Such novels are to be classed, not with works of imagination, but with historical games and geographic puzzles and the other miscuit utile dulci devices for learning easily what perhaps is as easily forgotten. There is also that to which the name historical ' novel' is most strictly applicable; the novel in which the main action and the principal characters are historical, the details and subordinate personages, and perhaps some slight under-plot, alone being fictitious. This class can scarcely be called a legitimate species of composition, being in effect, not a novel but a loose kind of history, the outline of which is filled in with imaginary details, and which is to that extent false in fact; besides being generally perverted by some historical crotchet or prejudice, the free indulgence of which is apt to be, in truth, the leading object

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of the writer. It is, in a word, history written with the license of fiction, an unsound kind of production and dangerous to the integrity of historic truth.

But The Virginians' is neither antiquarian nor, in the strict sense, historical. It is an attempt to create a good story and good characters, and at the same time to call from its grave a past age, in which the writer happens, probably from his admiration and deep study of Fielding, to take a great interest. I have drawn the figures as I fancied they were; set down conversations as I think I might have heard them; and so, to 'the best of my ability, endeavoured to revivify the bygone 'times and people.' We can easily enter into the feeling which prompts the attempt. But we suspect that the pensive pleasure of brooding over the past, which Mr. Thackeray, and not he alone, desires to clothe with a tangible form and communicate to others, is in fact an intellectual sensation eluding expression, and incapable of being communicated otherwise than by just touching the chord which vibrates to it in our hearts. It is like the sensation felt in looking at the sea, and susceptible only of the same kind of embodiment.

'Break, break, break

On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.'

The natural way of giving vent to a feeling of interest in a bygone time, and making others partake it, is to write a history of the time. And why should not Mr. Thackeray write a history of any time in which he feels interest? He possesses some of the highest qualities for such a task, provided the period he chooses be one in which individual character and action, rather than great movements or principles, would be the main subjects of description. His narratives of Marlborough's battles and his sketches of the characters of Marlborough and St. John in 'Esmond' are excellent in their way, and his knowledge of the period of English history between the Restoration and the revolutionary war must be very great. Let him think of this if his mine of pure fiction is for the present somewhat exhausted, as the recurrence of old characters and incidents rather indicates, and as it may well be, considering what store of rare metal he has dug from it. He should remember that he is already Fielding's superior in fertility as well as his rival in excellence.

In this hybrid sort of composition, between history and fiction, we confess we think his powers misapplied. It is at best an expenditure of strength in a tour de force. The bygone time,' however skilfully revivified,' is bygone, and touches us, espe

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cially those of us who are not well read in history, far less than the time in which we live. Mr. Tennyson has chosen the remotest age of chivalry for the scene of his Idylls of the King.' Milton had looked at the legends of Arthur, when casting about for a subject for his Epic, and, as it seems to us, with true poetic instinct, had rejected them, and chosen instead a great religious subject, of all times and of none, and the nearest of all subjects to the heart of his own generation. We desire to see in the hero of a novel our own ideal, as the Greek saw his own ideal in the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as the Knight of the Middle Ages saw his own ideal in the heroes of chivalrous romance; and we shall not be easily affected by the artificial reproduction of an ideal which is not ours. The living interest of the Idylls of the King' is, in truth, produced by the blending of entirely modern ideas and sentiments incongruously, however beautifully, with the names and actions of the chivalry of the Round Table; as may be clearly seen, for instance, in 'Vivien,' where the dialogue between Vivien and Merlin is impregnated with the spirit, not of the age of chivalry, but of the age of Goethe. If our age had ceased to afford good matter for narrative poetry or for novels, it would be a sign that narrative poetry and novels had reached the limit of their allotted reign, and that the time had arrived when the play of human imagination was about, Proteus-like, to assume another form. And if the value of an antiquarian novel is less than that of a living picture of ourselves to our own age, what will it be to posterity? What would be the value of Fielding to us, if instead of painting the squires and parsons of the pigtail age, he had chosen to paint the Tudor court, or even the Roundheads and Cavaliers? He would be a sort of Chatterton of novelists, and lie with Chatterton on the shelf. And such is the fate which Mr. Thackeray must expect for Esmond,' and The Virginians,' compared with Vanity Fair,' 'Pendennis,' and The Newcomes.' We would not have posterity too much considered. There is a good deal of affectation in writing as well as in acting for posterity. What glitters,' (says the poet in the prologue to Faust,') is born for the 'moment; what is genuine remains unlost to posterity.' 'I could hear no more about posterity!' replies Merryman. Suppose I chose to talk about posterity, who then would 'make fun for contemporaries? That they will have, and 'ought to have it.' But the fact is, the claims of contemporaries and posterity coincide. The best fun for both is a lively picture of the humourist's own time.

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• If

And then, if a bygone time is to be exhumed, and a Thackeray

is to be employed in the task, is the social epoch of the early Georges the one of all others peculiarly worth exhumation? Is it not rather the epoch which of all others might be most advantageously left to its repose? The general character of that epoch, perhaps, cannot be regarded as having been yet absolutely fixed. Lord Stanhope seems sometimes inclined to consider it an Augustan Age, while Mr. Massey treats it as an unredeemed abyss of all moral, social, legal, political, and ecclesiastical evil. That there must have been some good in it, with all its faults, is to us clear: or the nation could never have had the moral and spiritual energy to reform itself, and win its way back, as it happily has done, to better things. That there was some good in it is evident not only from the bright characters, the Chathams, Wolfes, Wesleys, Butlers, Johnsons, Berkeleys and Howards, which it produced; but still more from the respect and affection these characters commanded among the people. A nation cannot be utterly depraved when patriotism, pure genius, religious and philanthropic heroism, however rare, are the objects of popular affection. The fact seems to be that, as Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher' intimates, the upper classes were the worst, the corruption not having spread, at least in its most virulent form, to the middle and lower. The middle and lower classes thrust aside the political sharpers and caballers and bore Chatham on their shoulders to dictatorial power. The middle and lower classes received the religion which Wesley and Whitfield offered to their social superiors in vain. But as to the high society of the time, which is the society depicted in 'The Virginians,' there can be no manner of doubt that it was profligate, frivolous, sensual, heartless, and atheistical in the highest degree. There intervened, in fact, between the great political and religious movement of puritanism and constitutional liberty which ended in 1688, and the equally great political and religious movement which commenced with 1789, one of those slack tides of opinion and principle, in which the surface at least of the waters is sure to become putrescent, and to produce noisome creatures. As in the dreadful calm in The Ancient 6 Mariner,

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