THE LIBRARY OF CHOICE LITERATURE. 1811, died in London, Dec. 24, 1863. him a varied experience, first of fortune and then of po during their last unlucky season in London, and had expressed himself no better satisfied with Sir Francis and Lady Clavering and her ladyship's daughter than was the public in general. "The world is right," George said, "about those people. The THE WORLD BEHIND THE SCENES. [WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, born at Calcutta, His father was in the East India civil service, to which may be due many life-like pictures in his writings. His early life brought verty. The study of art took him for years to the Con-young men laugh and talk freely before tinent, and at the age of thirty he took up the profession those ladies, and about them. The girl sees people whom she has no right to know, and talks to men with whom no girl should have an intimacy. Did you see those two reprobates leaning over Lady Clavering's carriage in the Park the other day, and leering under Miss Blanche's bonnet? No good mother would let her daughter know those men, or admit them within her doors." of authorship, writing copiously for Punch and Fraser's Magazine. His first notable work of fiction, Vanity Fair, appeared in 1816-7, and his Lectures on English Humorists and on the Four Georges, wrought out with rare literary skill, were delivered to admiring audiences in England and America from 1851 to 1856. The Cornhill Magazine began in 1860 under Thackeray's editorship, and quickly ran to the unprecedented circulation of over 100,000 copies. In person Thackeray was tall, massive-i brained, and commanding with genial and kindly man ners. His place in the literature of the nineteenth century is a high one, and the title unquestionably belongs to him of the first satirist of the age. Nowhere are to be found such pictures of the meanness, selfishness, and heartless servility of society to rank and money, combined with skilful and masterly portraitures of noble and kindly men, and devoted, unselfish women. The style of Thackeray is his own, always pure, free and flowing, refined, yet forcible, while his delicate and subtile humor, frequently sportive, but never too broad, enlivens all his books, which are not wanting also in the deepest pathos, lofty morality and sometimes tragic "The Begum is the most innocent and good-natured soul alive," interposed Pen. "She never heard any harm of Captain Blackball, or read that trial in which Charley Lovelace figures. Do you suppose that honest ladies read and remember the Chronique Scandaleuse as well as you, you old grumbler?” "Would you like Laura Bell to know those fellows?" Warrington asked, his face turning rather red. Would you let any woman you loved be contaminated by their company? I have no doubt that poor Begum is ignorant of their histories. It seems to me she is ignorant of a great number of better things. It seems to me that your honest Begum is not a lady, Pen. It is not her fault, doubtless, that she has not had SO Pen had many acquaintances, and be the education or learned the refinements of ing of a jovial and easy turn, got more daily but no friend like Warrington; and the two men continued to live almost as much in common as the Knights of the Temple, riding upon one horse (for Pen's was at Warrington's service), and having their chambers and their servitor in common. Mr. Warrington had made the acquaintance of Pen's friends of Grosvenor Place a lady." "She is as moral as Lady Portsea, who has all the world at her balls, and as refined as Mrs. Bull, who breaks the king's English, and has half a dozen dukes at her table," Pen answered, rather sulkily. "Why should you and I be more squeamish than the rest of the world? Why are we to visit the sins of her fathers on this harmless, kind crea VOL. I. ture? She never did anything but kindness to you or any mortal soul. As far as she knows, she does her best. She does not set up to be more than she is. She gives you the best dinners she can buy, and the best company she can get. She pays the debts of that scamp of a husband of hers. She spoils her boy like the most virtuous mother in England. Her opinion about literary matters, to be sure is not much; and I dare say she never read a line of Wordsworth, or heard of Tennyson in her life." "No more has Mrs. Flanagan the laundress," growled out Pen's Mentor; "no more has Betty, the housemaid; and I have no word of blame against them. But a high-souled man doesn't make friends of these. A gentleman doesn't choose these for his companions, or bitterly rues it afterwards if he do. Are you, who are setting up to be a man of the world and a philosopher, to tell me that the aim of life is to guttle three courses and dine off silver? Do you dare to own to yourself that your ambition in life is good claret, and that you'll dine with any, provided you get a stalled ox to feed on? You call me a Cynic-why, what a monstrous Cynicism it is, which you and the rest of you men of the world admit! I'd rather live upon raw turnips and sleep in a hollow tree, or turn backwoodsman or savage, than degrade myself to this civilization, and own that a French cook was the thing in life best worth living for." "Because you like raw beef-steak and a pipe afterwards," broke out Pen, "you give yourself airs of superiority over people whose tastes are more dainty, and are not ashamed of the world they live in. Who goes about professing particular admiration, or esteem or friendship, or gratitude, even for the people one meets every day? If A. asks me to his house, and gives me his best, I take his good things for what they are worth and no more. I do not profess to pay him back in friendship, but in the convention's money of society. When we part, we part without any grief. When we meet, we are tolerably glad to see one another. If I were only to live with my friends, your black muzzle, old George, is the only face I should see.” "You are your uncle's pupil," said Warrington rather sadly; "and you speak like a worldling." "And why not?" asked Pendennis; "why not acknowledge the world I stand upon, and submit to the conditions of the society which we live in and live by? I am older than you, George, in spite of your grizzled whiskers, and have seen much more of the world than you have in your garret here, shut up with your books and your reveries and your ideas of one-and-twenty. 1 say, I take the world as it is, and being of it will not be ashamed of it. If the time is out of joint, have I any calling or strength to set it right?" 66 'Indeed, I don't think you have much of either," growled Pen's interlocutor. "If I doubt whether I am better than my neighbor," Arthur continued," If I concede that I am no better,-I also doubt whether he is better than I. I see men who begin with ideas of universal reform, and who, before their beards are grown, propound their loud plans for the regeneration of mankind, give up their schemes after a few years of bootless talking and vainglorious attempts to lead their fellows; and after they have found that men will no longer hear them, as indeed they never were in the least worthy to be heard, sink quietly into the rank and file,-acknowledging their aims impracticable, or thankful that they were never put into practice. The fiercest reformers grow calm, and are fain to put up with things as they are: the loudest Radical orators become dumb, quiescent placemen: the most fervent Liberals when out of power, become humdrum Conservatives, or downright tyrants or despots in office. Look at Thiers, look at Guizot, in opposition and in place! Look at the Whigs appealing to the country, and the Whigs in power! Would you say that the conduct of these men is an act of treason, as the Radicals bawl,-who would give way in their turn, were their turn ever to come? No, only that they submit to circumstances which are stronger than they,march as the world marches towards reform, but at the world's pace (and the movements of the vast body of mankind must needs be slow),-forego this scheme as impracticable, on account of opposition, that as immature, because against the sense of the majority,are forced to calculate drawbacks and difficulties, as well as to think of reforms and advances, and compelled finally to submit, and to wait and to compromise." "The Right honorable Arthur Pendennis could not speak better, or be more satisfied with himself, if he was first Lord of the Treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer," Warrington said. "Self-satisfied? Why self-satisfied?" continued Pen. "It seems to me that my You would have sacrificed to Jove," Warrington said, "had you lived in the time of the Christian persecutions." skepticism is more respectful and more mo- | divinely inherited power, the which truth dest than the revolutionary ardor of other absolute our ancestors burned at the stake, folks. Many a patriot of eighteen, many a and denied there; the which divine transSpouting-Club orator, would turn the Bishops missible power still exists in print-to out of the House of Lords to-morrow, and be believed, or not, pretty much at choice; throw the Lords out after the Bishops, and and of these, I say, I acquiesce that they throw the throne into the Thames after the exist, and no more. If you say that these Peers and the Bench. Is that man more schemes, devised before printing was known, modest than I, who take these institutions as or steam was born; when thought was an I find them, and wait for time and truth to infant, scared and whipped; and truth undevelop, or fortify, or (if you like) destroy der its guardians was gagged and swathed, them? A college tutor, or a nobleman's and blindfolded, and not allowed to lift its toady, who appears one fine day as my right voice, or to look out, or to walk under the reverend lord, in a silk apron and a shovel- sun; before men were permitted to meet, or hat, and assumes a benedictory air over me, to trade, or to speak with each other-If any is still the same man we remember at Ox- one says (as some faithful souls do) that bridge, when he was truckling to the tufts, these schemes are forever, and having been and bullying the poor undergraduates in changed and modified constantly are to be the lecture-room. An hereditary legislator, subject to no further development or decay, who passes his time with jockeys and black- I laugh, and let the man speak. But I legs and ballet-girls, and who is called to would have toleration for these, as I rule over me and his other betters because would ask it for my own opinions; and if his grandfather made a lucky speculation they are to die, I would rather they had a in the funds, or found a coal or tin mine on decent and natural than an abrupt and his property, or because his stupid ancestor violent death." happened to be in command of ten thousand men as brave as himself, who overcame twelve thousand Frenchmen, or fifty thousand Indians-such a man, I say, inspires me with no more respect than the bitterest democrat can feel towards him. But, such as he is, he is a part of the old society to which we belong and I submit to his lordship with acquiescence; and he takes his place above the best of us at all dinnerparties, and there bides his time. I don't want to chop his head off with a guillotine, or to fling mud at him in the street. When they call such a man a disgrace to his order; and such another, who is good and gentle, refined and generous, who employs his great means in promoting every kindness and charity, and art and grace of life, in the kindest and most gracious manner, an ornament to his rank-the question as to the use and propriety of the order is not in the least affected one way or other. There it is, extant among us, a part of our habits, the creed of many of us, the growth of centuries, the symbol of a most complicated tradition-there stand my lord the bishop and my lord the hereditary legislator-what the French call transactions both of them -representing in their present shape mailclad barons and double-sworded chiefs (from whom their lordships the hereditaries, for the most part, don't descend), and priests, professing to hold an absolute truth and a : 66 "Perhaps I would," said Pen, with some sadness. Perhaps I am a coward,-perhaps my faith is unsteady; but this is my own reserve. What I argue here is, that I will not persecute. Make a faith or a dogma absolute, and persecution becomes a logical consequence; and Dominic burns a Jew, or Calvin an Arian, or Nero a Christian, or Elizabeth or Mary a Papist or Protestant; or their father both or either, according to his humor; and acting without any pangs of remorse,-but on the contrary, with strict notions of duty fulfilled. Make dogma absolute, and to inflict or to suffer death becomes easy and necessary; and Mohammed's soldiers shouting 'Paradise! Paradise!' and dying on the Christian spears, are not more or less praiseworthy than the same men slaughtering a townful of Jews, or cutting off the heads of all prisoners who would not acknowledge that there was but one prophet of God." "A little while since, young one," Warrington said, who had been listening to his friend's confessions neither without sympathy nor scorn, for his mood led him to indulge in both, "you asked me why I remained out of the strife of the world, and looked on at the great labor of my neighbor without taking any part in the struggle? Why, what a |