Henry, then an inmate of the house of an old French refugee. He is kindly treated and educated under the care of a Jesuit priest, one Father Holt, until he attains the age of twelve years, when his father having joined the army of King James, Lady Castlewood is arrested on a charge of high treason. The Lord of Castlewood is afterwards killed at the Battle of the Boyne, and his cousin Francis inherits the title and estates.

This stage of the history introduces us to a new set of characters, in the persons of the second Lady Castlewood, her son Francis, and her daughter Beatrice. The boy remains in his old home, until the period has arrived for his entrance at college. This lady

proves the guiding star of his existence; and, in the delineation of the boy's affection for her occur some of the most beautiful and touching passages of the story at this period.

Lord Mohun makes his appearance on the stage. His attentions to the mistress of Castlewood excite the jealousy of her careless lord. A duel is the indirect result, which ends in the death of the Viscount. He makes a death-bed confession, however, to one Mr. Atterbury, that Henry was the lawful issue of the late lord, and heir to the title and estates-a fact which the pecuniary difficulties into which the Viscount had fallen, had rendered it necessary for him to conceal. The confession is burned by Esmond, as soon as he reads it; he makes the magnanimous resolution never to assert his rights, so as to cause any injury to the family who had so kindly befriended him. Being thrown into prison for the share he had taken in the fatal duel, he loses a church-living, for which he had originally been destined, and enters the army under the famous Duke of Marlborough, whose picture is thus presented to us with a terrible distinct

ness:

"Our chief, whom England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchman, worshipped almost, had this of the god-like in him, that he was impassable before victory, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle, or the most trivial ceremony, before a hundred thousand men, drawn in battalia, a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or a monarch's court, or a cottage table, where his plans were laid, or an enemy's battery, vomiting flame and death, he was always cold, calm, resolute like

fate. He performed a treason or a court bow; he told a falsehood as black as Styx as easily as he paid a compliment or spoke about the weather. He took a mistress, and left her; he betrayed his benefactor, and supported him, or would have murdered him always; and having no more remorse than Clotho, when she weaves the thread, or Lachesis, when she cuts it. In the hour of battle, I have heard the Prince of Savoy's officers say, the prince became possessed with a sort of warlike fury-hiseyes lighted up, he rushed hither and thither, raging, he shrieked curses and encouragement, yelling and lashing his bloody war-dogs on, and himself always at the front of the hunt. Our duke was as calm at the mouth of the cannon as at the door of a drawing-room. Perhaps he could not have been the great man he was, had he had a heart either for love, or hatred, or pity, or fear, or regret, or remorse. He achieved the highest deed of daring, or deepest calculation of thought, as he performed the very meanest action of which a man is capable; told a lie, or cheated a fond woman, or robbed a poor beggar of a halfpenny with the like awful serenity, and equal capacity of the highest or lowest acts of our nature. His qualities were pretty well known in the army, where there were parties of all politics, and plenty of shrewdness and wit; but these invested such a perfect confidence in him as the first captain of the world, and such a faith in his prodigious genius and fortune, that the very men whom he notoriously cheated of their pay-the chiefs whom he used and injured, for he used all men, great and small, that came near him, as his instruments alike, and took something of theirs, either some quality or some property-the blood of a soldier, it might be, or a jewelled hat, or a hundred thousand crowns from a king, or a portion out of a starving sentinel's three farthings; or (when he was young) a kiss from a woman, and the gold chain off her neck, taking all he could from woman or man, and having, as I have said, this of the god-like in him, that he could see a hero perish or a sparrow fall, with the same amount of sympathy for either. Not that he had no tears-he could always order up this reserve at the proper moment to battle; he could draw upon tears and smiles alike; and whenever need was for using this cheap coin, he would cringe to a shoe-black as he would flatter a minister or a monarch; be haughty, be humble, threaten, repent, weep, grasp your hand or stab you, whenever he saw occasion. But yet those of the army who knew him best, and had suffered most from him, admired him most of all; and as he rode along the lines to battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion, reeling from before the enemy's charge or shot, the fainting men and officers go t new courage as they saw the splendid calm of his face, and felt that his will made them irresistible."

Colonel Esmond-the wars being over-retires from the army, and mingles at home with the great wits and statesmen of the day. He becomes, too, desperately enamoured of his cousin Beatrice, who amuses herself by coquetishly exacting the passion of her lover, much in the same way as Becky Sharp used to plague her adorers. Here is her picture :—

"The most beautiful woman in England in 1712, when Esmond returned to this country; a lady of high birth, and though of no fortune, to be sure, with a thousand fascinations of wit and manners. Beatrice Esmond was now six-and-twenty years old, and Beatrice Esmond still. Of her hundred adorers she had not chosen one for a husband: and those who had asked her had been jilted by her, and more still, had left her. A succession of near ten years' crop of beauties had come up since her time, and been reaped by proper husbandmen, if we may make an agricultural simile, and been housed long ago.

Her own contemporaries

were sober mothers by this time; girls with not a tithe of her charms or her wit, having made good matches, and now claiming precedence over the spinster who lately had derided and outshone them. The young beauties were beginning to look down on Beatrice as an old maid, and sneer and call her one of Charles II.'s ladies, and ask whether her portrait was not in the Hampton Court Gallery? Part of her coquetry may have come from her position about the court, where the beautiful maid of honour was the light about which a thousand beaux came and fluttered; where she was sure to have a ring of admirers round her, crowding to listen to her repartees as much as to admire her beauty; and where she spoke and listened to much free talk, such as one never would have thought the lips or ears of Rachel Castlewood's daughter would have uttered or heard. When in waiting at Windsor or Hampton, the court ladies and gentlemen would be making riding parties together; Miss Beatrice, in a humorous coat and hat, the foremost after the stag-hounds and over the park fences, a crowd of young fellows at her heels. If the English country ladies at this time were the most pure and modest of any ladies in the world, the English town and court ladies permitted themselves words and behaviour that were neither modest nor pure, and claimed, some of them, a freedom which those who love that sex most would never wish to grant them. But still she reigned, at least in one man's opinion, superior over all the little misses that were the toasts of the young lads, and, in Esmond's eyes, was ever perfectly lovely and young.

"Who knows how many were made happy by favouring her?-or rather, how many were fortunate in escaping this syren? "Tis

a marvel to think that her mother was the purest and simplest woman in the whole world, and that this girl should have been born from her. I am inclined to fancy my mistress, who never said a harsh word to her children (and but twice or thrice only to one person), must have been too forced and pressing with the maternal authority, for her son and her daughter both revolted early, nor after their first flight from the nest could they ever be brought back again to their mother's bosom. Lady Castlewood, and perhaps it was as well, knew little of her daughter's real life and thoughts; how was she to apprehend what passed at the queen's antichambers and court tables? She was alike powerless to resist or to lead her daughter, or to command or persuade her."

This charming young person is at length on the eve of marriage with the Duke of Hamilton. But when the trouseau is prepared and everything ready, his grace is killed in a duel with Lord Mohun, and the effect of this blow upon the pride of Beatrice is told in some passages of singular grace and power. The whole of the dramatis persone now become involved in a plot, with the leaders of the Jacobite party, to bring back the Pretender. The prince has arrived in England, and takes up his abode at Lady Castlewood's house, in Chelsea. He becomes enamoured of the fair Beatrice, who gives him so much "encouragement" that she is taken away by her relatives, and shut up in Castlewood. The prince having followed in pursuit, is out of the way at a critical period of his fortunes. When he is wanted he is not to be found, and the Jacobite conference is broken up. The Pretender returns to France, and the novel closes with the marriage of Lady Castlewood to the hero of the story.

In dealing with the first appearance in this species of fiction, of so distinguished a writer, we are not disposed to be hypercritical. We have some doubts if the author be always correct in his statements. We rather incline to think that he has substituted one Pretender for another, and we doubt if the game of whist was known in England in the reign of Queen Anne; and we are quite certain that so very shrewd an observer of mankind as the great Dean of St. Patrick's would never have been thick-witted enough to mistake a distinguished soldier, like Colonel Esmond, for a back writer in a newspaper office. In these days, when a peer may be seen walking

to the House in a paletot and tweed continuations, it is quite possible that the gentleman of the Times, who is going down to report his speech, may be the better-dressed man of the two. But in the time of the Spectator, nothing could be more marked than the difference between the costume of the various classes of the community. A distinguished officer in her Majesty's service could be no more mistaken for a Grub-street writer, than the author of "Vanity Fair" for Mrs. Harris or Mrs. Grundy. Nor are we able to accept the dramatis persona, who figure in the story as new creations. To us they wear the look of wellknown faces. There is about the gallant Colonel, with his brave true heart and affectionate nature, a certain family resemblance to blundering old Dobbin; and if the fair Beatrice does occasionally remind us of Rebecca, we can trace a likeness as well between the Lady of Castlewood and Helen Pendennis. In a word, while "Esmond' gives us abundant proof of its author's complete mastery over the rhetorical part of fiction, his fine appreciation of character, and his power in its delineation, we think he is more completely in his element when he describes characters of his own times than of those from whom he is separated by so long an interval. It is manifestly impossible for a writer of such marked originality to merge his characters so as to soften their individuality; and yet so well is this book written, so completely has it caught the spirit of those times, we have no doubt that had it been palmed upon the public as an authentic record, it would have passed muster, provided the public had known nothing of Mr. Thackeray or his previous writings. But so familiar and so well known are they, so distinguished by striking peculiarities altogether their own, that neither the old type, the quaint phraseology, nor the persons with whom we are associated, can make us, for a single instant, the victims of the delusion. We feel the whole of the dramatis personæ, the creatures of the nineteenth century, dressed up in the quaint attire of by-gone times. Their costume is perfect. Their sayings and doings are in

"Reuben Medlicot; or, the Coming Man."

good keeping, but they are stamped in the Thackeray mint, and the impression is too indelible to be mistaken for an instant. What advantage, then, can be gained by this distinguished writer projecting himself into the past, getting up with infinite pains and labour a vast quantity of antiquated material, and then weaving it into the form of an old romance, when he has only to look forth into the world before him, quaintly and curiously as is his fashion, and write? In saying this we mean not to depreciate, in the least, the value of the book he has just given us. But we would rather keep the writer among ourselves. No better illustrations can be afforded now by the most patient industry and toil, the most minute research, and the most splendid imagination, than the writers of those days have left behind them in their own works. So long as the works of Swift and the Spectator, with other of their great contemporaries, remain, we want nothing further. We say this in no spirit of disparagement. Whatever genius, labour, humour, and perseverance could accomplish, has been successfully done in the volumes before us. But that genius, and those other qualities with which Mr. Thackeray is gifted in no ordinary degree, we would prefer should be applied to the age in which he lives. His great powers, instead of being squandered in research and imitation of the writings of others, should be applied in leaving monuments which men of after-times will study with instruction and delight.

From the reign of Queen Anne to that of George IV. is a good long stride; but the critic, to whom time and space are matters of indifference, thinks nothing of it. We have but to reach out our hand and open another volume and, presto! we find ourselves in another age. The gallant loyal-hearted soldier; the capricious beauty, who held him sighing in her chains; the atrabilious Churchman ; the reckless Dick Steele, and the accomplished Addison, fade into the distance, and we are surrounded by beings of our own time once more.

The charming novel* we now open

belongs to the didactic school of fiction. The moral it professes to inculcate is the necessity of steadiness and singleness of purpose, to those who would succeed in life. "Unstable as water thou shalt not excel," is the text which is enforced upon us, in a discourse as brilliant and as powerful as any we have ever read.

If any one expects to find in this novel any of the old stock machinery of fiction, he will be sadly disappointed. The plot is simple, barely sufficient to string the characters together. There are no harrowing passages, nor any scenes of a sentimental kind; but, as in the author's previous novels, the realities of life are painted with an honest and vigorous pencil. There is no pandering to the cant of the day, nor any chiming in with whatever cry happens to be uppermost; but a fine healthy tone of thought, an accurate discrimination of character, and a power of humorous description, which never flags.

The satire of Mr. Savage is of a healthy kind, rather that of the friend who laughs at our weakness, than the illnatured cynic who sneers at us for having them. If he does not look at mankind through pink glasses, which convert every object into a rose-coloured monster of perfection-after the manner of some contemporaries whom we could name-neither does he gaze upon human nature with a microscope, eager to detect flaws which he may hold up to odium.

The hero of the story is the son of a country clergyman, and the grandson of a dean, who obtains a mitre by ratting on the Catholic question. He is educated at Cambridge, and destined for the Church, as a matter of course; but the habits of desultory reading and dillitante trifling into which he had insensibly fallen, together with an overweening estimate of his own powers, have unfitted him for adhering steadily to any one pursuit. He makes a speech upon the subject of consistency, at the time his grandfather went over to the minister, which effectually demolishes his prospects of promotion in the Church. His friends advise him to go the bar, where a brilliant career is anticipated for him; he acts upon their suggestion, succeeds very tolerably while the fit lasts, but abandons, after a little time, the forum for the senate. His chance of parliamentary suc

cess is spoiled by his again speaking at the wrong time. Having failed in public life, he is so fortunate as to obtain what many who had succeeded would be glad to secure-viz., a snug place with very little to do. That little he trusts to a deputy, who robs him, and then steps into his shoes. All other trades having failed, he terminates his career by turning Quaker, of which sect his wife was a member. But the same ill-fortune which attended him in the earlier portions of his career, follows him to the close: advancing years having diminished his physical powers, he appears upon the stage for the last time, an unsuccessful and a brokenhearted man. We must allow the author to speak for himself. The scene is beautifully described:

"A very short time since, two students of the same college, where Reuben Medlicot received his education, sauntering late one summer evening on the banks of their favourite stream, observed a melancholy man, with a frame broken down more by grief and malady than by years; his cheek hollow, his eye dim, and his lip quivering, moving feebly beneath the willows. Something intellectual in his countenance, faded and worn as it was, together with an air of distinction about him, the remains of former consequence, whether real or imaginary, excited their curiosity, and tempted them to address him. Feebly, but politely, he received and even encouraged their advances. Evidently pleased to talk, and, perhaps, flattered by their willingness to listen, he inquired about their studies, then spoke about his own formerly; began by relating his college recollections, and at length proceeded to unfold the history of his life. He surprised them by his knowledge of many subjects and even professions: delighted them by the variety and even the brilliancy of his language: perplexed them by the extent of his experience as a lawyer, an auther, a traveller, and a divine. They marvelled, as he talked, who the man could be, seemingly possessing every talent and all accomplishments, yet wandering there forlorn, needy, and unknown. The mood of his narration changed often; now it was calm, now excited, but most frequently it was in a tone of deep pathos, as if there was always some regret uppermost-some painful emotion, even when he recalled his triumphs. At length he stopped suddenly in his tale, and leaning on his staff, regarded his hearers earnestly, and bade them mark his counsel, for it was the province of age to instruct youth.

"I have excited your admiration, young men,' he said, while I only merit your cm-passion. You see in me a signal example of

how little is to be done in this busy world, by much knowledge, much talent, much ambition, nay, even by much activity, without singleness of aim and steadiness of purpose; for want of these two undazzling qualities, my life has been a broken promise and a perpetual disappointment.' . A tear rolled down the old man's cheek, when he came to the last words of the quotation. The young men were much affected, and waited in respectful silence for him to resume his discouse, but he broke it off abruptly, with an ejaculation in so low a tone, that it scarcely reached the ear. 'Alas! he sighed, 'what I might have been.'

"Not many weeks later, the same infirm old man was seen in one of the green lanes near Chichester. He took up his abode as a lodger, in a small cottage, from which he only removed to lie in the same grave with his father in the quiet churchyard of Underwood, where an ancient raven, hopping from an adjoining garden, through a stately row of yews, croaked his requiem."

The brief outline which we have thus given will show how admirably adapted is this book for the exercise of Mr. Savage's peculiar powers. His chief forte lies in the delineation of character. A keen observation has furnished him with ample materials, out of which he builds up, piece by piece, the creation of his fictions. He lingers over his work, bringing out into stronger relief the lights and shadows, until the picture seems breathing from the canvas. If his imaginative power, or rather the power of constructing a story of continuous interest, were equal to those other qualities with which he is gifted, he would, beyond all question, be one of the very first writers of his time. We rather incline, however, to the belief, that the defects of his books, regarding them in an artistic point of view, are less owing to any want of power than to want of care, or, it may be, of knowledge of his art. In the novel now before us there are passages of singular force and beauty, such as could never have been produced save by genius of the very highest order; but, as the story comes near to its termination, we feel that, as a story, its interest is over;-why, it would be impossible to tell. We meet with gems of thought, as bright and brilliant as ever, but the setting is not so good; either the workman has grown tired of his work, or, from other causes, he is unable to finish it. The moral teacher's aim and object are worked out; but the claboration and careful hand

ling, which made the commencement so delightful, are not found as he approaches near a close. The author's perception of individuality, his keen humour, and power of vigorous as well as sparkling description, never flag. The commonplaces of criticism, as applied to this writer's works, are strangely at fault. They are a class in themselves they are undoubted originals; and we are greatly mistaken if any other writer of this day could produce them. The difficulty of conveying, to those who have not read it any adequate idea of the singular power of this book is considerable; for the characters are only perfectly evolv ed in the progress of the story. Like the old and familiar illustration of the "brick," a bit or two will give but a poor idea of the whole structure. We wish to make the world at large acquainted with Dean Wyndham, but we find it out of the question. All we can do is, to let such as please it have a peep at him, or rather at a fragment of him; but he must be seen as he moves all through the piece, teres atque rotundus, to be thoroughly appre

ciated.

The book contains many other characters, which are perfectly uniquesuch as the Pigwidgeons, father and son

they are new creations, so far as our opinion goes. We do not remember

that we ever met them in the realms of fiction; but being there now, they must remain immortal. De Tabley, too, and the aunt of Reuben, the magnates of Chichester, and the family of the ambitious wine merchant, are all exquisite in their way. If Cervantes could have seen them, he would have left them on record; but we doubt if he could have made of them preserved meats for the delectation of posterity, in a happier manner than the author of the "Coming Man."

We had been led to the conclusion, from a perusal of his former works, that Mr. Savage, however gifted in other respects, had but little power of pathos, that his mind was too hard and too keen to admit images of tenderness. We are glad he has afforded us an opportunity of seeing our error. Let the following passage suffice:—

"The Vicar fell with the leaf. It was a chill, damp day, towards the close of October, when his remains were committed to the earth, within a dozen yards of the spot whose