There is no doubt as to the true humour of Addison, who next comes up before us, but I think that he makes hardly so good a subject for a lecturer as the great gloomy man of intellect, or the frivolous man of pleasure. Thackeray tells us all that is to be said about him as a humourist in so few lin s that I may almost insert them on this page: "But it is not for his reputation as the great author of Cato and The Campaign, or for his merits as Secretary of State, or for his rank and high distinction as Lady Warwick's husband, or for his eminence as an examiner of political questions on the Whig side, or a guardian of British liberties, that we admire Joseph Addison. It is as a Tattler of small talk and a Spectator of mankind that we cherish and love him, and owe as much pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote. He came in that artificial age, and began to speak with his noble natural voice. He came the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind judge, who castigated only in smiling. While Swift went about hanging and ruthless, a literary Jeffreys, in Addison's kind court only minor cases were tried ;-only peccadilloes and small sins against society, only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops, or a nuisance in the abuse of beaux canes and snuffboxes." Steele set The Tatler a-going. "But with his friend's discovery of The Tatler, Addison's calling was found, and the most delightful Tattler in the world began to speak. He does not go very deep. Let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking that he couldn't go very deep. There is no trace of suffering in his writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully selfish-if I must use the word!"

Such was Addison as a humourist; and when the hearer shall have heard also-or the reader read-that this most charming Tattler also wrote Cato, became a Secretary of State, and married a countess, he will have learned all that Thackeray had to tell of him.

Steele was one who stood much less high in the world's esteem, and who left behind him a much smaller name-but was quite Addison's equal as a humourist and a wit. Addison, though he had the reputa tion of a toper, was respectability itself. Steele was almost always disreputable. He was brought from Ireland, placed at the Charter House, and then transferred to Oxford, where he became acquainted with Addison. Thackeray says that "Steele found Addison a stately college don at Oxford.". The stateliness and the don's rank were attributable no doubt to the more sober character of the English lad, for, in fact, the two men were born in the same year, 1672. Steele, who during his life was affected by various different tastes, first turned himself to literature, but early in life was bitten by the hue of a red coat and became a trooper in the Horse Guards. To the end he vacillated in the same way. In that charming paper in The Tatler, in which he records his father's death, his mother's griefs, his own most solemn and tender emotions, he says he is interrupted by the ar

rival of a hamper of wine, 'the same as is to be sold at Garraway's next week;' upon the receipt of which he sends for three friends, and they fall to instantly, drinking two bottles apiece, with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o'clock in the morning."

He had two wives, whom he loved dearly and treated badly. He hired grand houses, and bought fine horses for which he could never pay. He was often religious, but more often drunk. As a man of letters, other men of letters who followed him, such as Thackeray, could not be very proud of him. But everybody loved him; and he seems to have been the inventor of that flying literature which, with many changes in form and manner, has done so much for the amusement and edification of readers ever since his time. He was always commencing, or carrying on—often editing-some one of the numerous periodicals which appeared during his time. Thackeray mentions seven: The Tatler, The Spectator, The Guardian, The Englishman, The Lover, The Reader, and The Theatre; that three of them are well known to this day-the three first named—and are to be found in all libraries, is proof that his life was not thrown away.

""

I almost question Prior's right to be in the list, unless, indeed, the mastery over well-turned conceits is to be included within the border of humour. But Thackeray had a strong liking for Prior, and in his own humorous way rebukes his audience for not being familiar with The Town and Country Mouse. He says that Prior's epigrams have the genuine sparkle, and compares Prior to Horace. His song, his philosophy, his good sense, his happy, easy turns and melody, his loves and his epicureanism, bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and accomplished master." I cannot say that I agree with this. Prior is generally neat in his expression. Horace is happy— which is surely a great deal more.

All that is said of Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding is worth reading, and may be of great value both to those who have not time to study the authors, and to those who desire to have their own judgments somewhat guided, somewhat assisted. That they were all men of humour there can be no doubt. Whether either of them, except perhaps Gay, would have been specially ranked as a humourist among men of letters, may be a question.

Sterne was a humourist, and employed his pen in that line, if ever a writer did so, and so was Goldsmith. Of the excellence and largeness of the disposition of the one, and the meanness and littleness of the other, it is not necessary that I should here say much. But I will give a short passage from our author as to each. He has been quoting somewhat at length from Sterne, and thus he ends: "And with this pretty dance and chorus the volume artfully concludes. Even here one can't give the whole description. There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption-a hint as of an impure presence. Some of that dreary

double entendre may be attributed to freer times and manners thuil ours-but not all. The foul satyr's eyes leer out of the leaves constantly. The last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked. The last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon." Now a line or two about Goldsmith, and I will then let my reader go to the volume and study the lectures for himself. "" The poor fellow was never so friendless but that he could befriend some one; never so pinched and wretched but he could give of his crust, and speak his word of compassion. If he had but his flute left, he would give that, and make the children happy in the dreary London courts.'

""

Of this, too, I will remind my readers-those who have bookshelves well-filled to adorn their houses-that Goldsmith stands in the front

where all the young people see the volumes. There are few among the young people who do not refresh their sense of humour occasionally from that shelf; Sterne is relegated to some distant and high corner. The less often that he is taken down the better. Thackeray makes some half excuse for him because of the greater freedom of the times. But the times" were the same for the two. Both Sterne and Goldsmith wrote in the reign of George II.; both died in the reign of George III.

CHAPTER VIII.

THACKERAY'S BALLADS.

WE have a volume of Thackeray's poems, republished under the name of Ballads, which is, I think, to a great extent a misnomer. They are almost all readable, almost all good. full of humour, and with some fine touches of pathos, most happy in their versification, and, with a few exceptions, hitting well on the head the nail which he intended to hit. But they are not on that account bal'ads. Literally, a ballad is a song; but it has come to signify a short chronicle in verse, which may be political, or pathetic, or grotesque or it may have all three characteristics or any two of them; but not on that account is any grotesque poem a ballad-nor, of course, any pathetic or any politic 1 poem. Jacob Omnium's Hoss may fairly be called a ballad, containing as it does a chronicle of a certain well-defined transaction; and the story of King Canute is a ballad-one of the best that has been produced in our language in modern years. But such pieces as those called The End of the Play and Vanitas Vanitatum, which are didactic as well as pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as The Mahogany Tree, or the little collection called Love Songs made Easy. The majority of the

pieces are not ballads; but if they be good of the kind, we should be ungrateful to quarrel much with the name.

How very good most of them are, I did not know till I re-read them for the purpose of writing this chapter. There is a manifest falling off in some few-which has come from that source of literary failure which is now so common. If a man write a book or a poem because it is in him to write it-the motive power being altogether in himself, and coming from his desire to express himself-he will write it well, presuming him to be capable of the effort. But if he write his book or poem simply because a book or poem is required from him, let its capability be what it may, it is not unlikely that he will do it badly. Thackeray occasionally suffered from the weakness thus produced. A ballad from Policeman X-Bow Street Ballads they were first called-was required by Punch, and had to be forthcoming, whatever might be the poet's humour, by a certain time. Jacob Omnium's Hoss is excellent. His heart and feeling were all there, on behalf of his friend, and against that obsolete old court of justice. But we can tell well when he was looking through the police reports for a subject, and taking what chance might send him, without any special interest in the matter. The Knight and the Lady of Bath, and the Damages Two Hundred Pounds, as they were demanded at Guildford, taste as though they were written to order.

Here, in his verses as in his prose, the charm of Thackeray's work lies in the mingling of humour with pathos and indignation. There is hardly a piece that is not more or less funny, hardly a piece that is not satirical;-and in most of them, for those who will look a little below the surface, there is something that will touch them. Thackeray, though he rarely uttered a word, either with his pen or his mouth, in which there was not an intention to reach our sense of humour, never was only funny. When he was most determined to make us laugh he had always a further purpose; some pity was to be extracted from us on behalf of the sorrows of men, or some indig. nation of the evil done by them.

This is the beginning of that story as to the Two Hundred Pounds, for which, as a ballad, I do not care very much :

Special jurymen of England who admire your country's laws,
And proclaim a British jury worthy of the nation's applause,
Gaily compliment each other at the issue of a cause,

Which was tried at Guilford 'sizes, this day week as ever was.

Here he is indignant, not only in regard to some miscarriage of justice on that special occasion, but at the general unfitness of jurymen for the work confided to them. "Gaily compliment yourselves," he says, on your beautiful constitution, from which come such beautiful results as those I am going to tell you!" When he reminded us that Ivanhoe had produced Magna Charta, there was a purpose of irony

even there in regard to our vaunted freedom. With all your Magna Charta and your juries, what are you but snobs? There is nothing so often misguided as general indignation, and I think that in his judgment of outside things, in the measure which he usually took of them, Thackeray was very frequently misguided. A satirist by trade will learn to satirise everything, till the light of the sun and the moon's loveliness will become evil and mean to him. I think that he was mistaken in his views of things. But we have to do with him as a writer, not as a political economist or as a politician. His indignation was all true, and the expression of it was often perfect. The lines in which he addresses that Pallis Court, at the end of Jacob Omnium's Hoss, are almost sublime.

O Pallis Court, you move
My pity most profound.

A most amusing sport

You thought it, I'll be bound,

To saddle up a three-pound debt,
With two-and twenty pound.

Good sport it is to you

To grind the honest poor,
To pay their just cr unjust debts
With eight hundred per cent., for Lor;
Make haste and get your costes in,
They will not last much mor!

Come down from that tribewn,

Thou shameless and unjust;
Thou swindle, picking pockets in
The name of Truth august;
Come down, thy hoary Blasphemy,
For die thou shalt and must.

And go it, Jacob Homnium,
And ply your iron pen,
And rise up, Sir John Jervis,
And shut me up that den;
That sty for fattening lawyers in,
On the bones of honest men.

"Come down from that tribewn, thou shameless and unjust!" It is impossible not to feel that he felt this as he wrote it.

There is a branch of his poetry which he calls-or which at any rate is now called-Lyra Hybernica, for which no doubt The Groves of Blarney was his model. There have been many imitations since, of which perhaps Barham's ballad on the coronation was the best, "When to Westminster the Royal Spinster and the Duke of Leinster all in order did repair!" Thackeray, in some of his attempts, has been equally droll and equally graphic. That on The Cristal Palace -not that at Sydenham, but its foerrunner, the palace of the Great Exhibition-is very good, as the following catalogue of its contents will show :

There's holy saints
And window paints,
By Maydiayval Pugin;
Alhamborough Jones
Did paint the tones

Of yellow and gambouge in.

There's fountains there
And crosses fair;

There's water-gods with urns;

There's organs three,
To play, d'ye see?

"God save the Queen," by turns.

There's statues bright

Of marble white,

Of silver, and of copper;

And some in zinc,

And some, I think,

That isn't over proper.