you are sure of a good market for your works; but it is only by real genius that this can be done. Every one, I suppose, meets people such as one reads of in Vanity Fair and Pendennis, and in his secret heart and half unconsciously laughs and sneers at their follies or their vices; but he has no satisfaction in doing so, because not understanding the precise grounds on which he does it, or not being able to express them in a popular and effective manner, he cannot communicate with others upon the subject and so obtain their sympathy. The secret of success in a great author is, that he supplies this defect. He points out to the ordinary individual the peculiarities of speech, gesture, and conduct which produced in him the derisive feeling in question, and by treating them as matter for ridicule, both sympathizes himself and enables others to sympathize with him. To do this thoroughly, as Mr. Thackeray does it, is given to few. Vanity Fair is a master-work. Neither Thackeray himself nor any one else has done anything equal to it in its kind. We seem, not to be reading about people, but living among them. It is not imitation, it is creation; it is not fiction, it is fact. Bitter and cynical enough it is; but to accuse a satirist of being bitter and cynical is only to say that he is doing efficiently his proper work, which is that of bringing into scorn and contempt those dispositions and actions which are the reverse of what is noble in human nature. If indeed the satirist attributes to his characters faults or crimes other or greater than those which are found by experience to be incidental to humanity, he grievously crrs, and will infallibly fail of success. Becky Sharp and old Sir Pitt Crawley have been occasionally looked upon with suspicion from this point of view; but the verdict of the public was ultimately in their favour. Execrable as they are, they are not unfair pictures of the form which extreme selfishness is apt to take in the masculine and feminine natures respectively. No doubt that in the exercise of his vocation a writer such as Thackeray ministers to that loathsome mix

ture of pride and malice which constitutes the delight felt more or less by all in the exposure of the errors and foibles of others; but if this is a reason why such books ought not to be written, it is also a reason against all censure of that which is ignoble and hypocritical and selfish and silly and base. If the tendency of such writing is to foster a censorious, uncharitable spirit, and to make the social world look uglier than it really is, that is an evil effect of it against which both the writer and the reader must

jealously guard themselves, and not

one which should deter a man from chastising, if he can, with a scorpionlash, the frivolities and vulgarisms and vices of his age. It is dirty work, and there is a good deal less love than admiration in the feeling which you have towards the man who does it well; nevertheless, if he carefully avoids all libel on humanity, and shrinks with horror from anything like irreverent treatment of that which is really noble and pure and true, he is without doubt a benefactor to mankind.

Of novels proper, or books claiming to be such, there has been since the days of Scott a constantly increasing supply, till imaginary heroes have become much commoner than real ones, and there is a great deal more love in fiction than there is in fact. And this, perhaps, was natural enough. The idea once started, it seems so easy to write a novel. Absolutely all that seems requisite is leisure and pens and paper. Unless you are dull or practical to an inconceivable degree, to make an interesting hero and a charming' heroine, and group round them a set of accessory characters drawn from your own experience of life, must surely be a labour of love; and when you think of the thrilling incidents you can introduce, and of all the wise and witty and original remarks on men and manners which you will throw in, you feel that success is certain. And yet how many good novels have we -how many even readable' ones? Our readable novelists, living and writing at the present time, may be counted on our fingers; and our really good novelists, so living and writing, cannot be counted at all

till he saw the stage was clear. The by-play of this exciting plot consists of interminable discussions about such subjects as the weather, or the next county ball, or the conduct of somebody (I think the roué lover) in going up to London for a day to

have his hair cut. Of course it is conceivable that a novel with such a plot might have been made interesting. If, for instance, the prig had been drawn like the younger Pitt Crawley, or the roué like Rawdon, we should have forgiven a great deal. But the prig is only the conventional outline of the character, and the roué the mere walking gentleman' of the play. As to style I find no fault with Miss Austen. She writes in plain, quiet, harmonious English the dullest stories that ever were conceived. It is not that thrilling' incidents are required to make a good novel. If the exciting part of the story were eliminated from the Vicar of Wakefield, and the incident left as tame as that of Miss Austen, the Vicar of Wakefield would, I think, be improved; it would at all events still remain as delightful a book as ever charmed and solaced the soul of man. Since Miss Austen we have had several readable' ladynovelists; and the best of them, I think, is Mrs. Gore, who is remarkable above all the daughters of Eve for her knowledge of London society, and especially, strange to say, of the habits of London' men about town.' I do not know that I ever in my life experienced so great a surprise as in finding that Cecil was written by a lady. There are one or two novels by Lady Georgina Fullarton which show power and passion almost enough to lift them above the 'readable' order, and gave hopes that she might do something really great, or would have given them, but that her second novel was inferior to her first; and very much the same may be said of Miss Kavanagh, who has given signs of something not unlike real genius and knowledge of her art. The author of the Heir of Redclyffe is scarcely to be called a novelist in the ordinary sense of the term; but in her elaborate, minute, and careful pictures of domestic life we have here and there a central or promi

nent figure as nobly conceived as any which our literature can show.

I said that (excepting Bulwer) the best novelists of our century have been lady-novelists. I go further, and say that the best novel » of our century has been written by a lady in her teens. If you doubt this, read Jane Eyre over again; for of course you have read it once. It is written with the instinctive and consummate power of real commanding genius. Every line is drawn and every touch laid on with the ease and precision of a master-hand. It was no elaborate complication of a skilfully devised story-no gradually and painfully unravelling web of treachery or crime-no phantasmagoria of intricately-connected characters flitting ever before the bewildered brain of the unhappy reader-that made this young school-girl immortal. A forlorn governess, whose master falls in love with her, his wife in a state of hopeless insanity being secreted in his house without the knowledge of any one but himself and one servant, was the material on which she worked. Not a very promising one for feeble or secondrate faculties, but which, in the hands of real genius, was certain of success. Never was the growth of love described with a more subtle knowledge of the workings of a woman's heart-never were terror, pain, remorse, and the fearful conflict of principle with temptation, described with a more sublime yet simple truth. There is but one other modern novel, I think, equal in power to this, in which, indeed, the power is almost Titanic, and the great passions, terribly real and life-like, stalk about and jostle one another in all their naked deformity; and that is written by whom does the reader think?-by another young girl scarcely out of the school-room, a daughter of the same strangely. gifted house. Wuthering Heights, considering its authorship, I look upon as the greatest intellectual prodigy that the world has seen. It was not very successful, for it had not the constructive art of Jane Eyre. Though there are terrible incidents, plot' of the story there is none; but as a picture of fierce and strong human nature,

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utterly untutored and untamed, left to run wild in the gloomy loneliness of a farm on the northern moors, it is marvellous. Surely,' I have heard it said, 'there never were such people, at least let us hope not.' For myself, I fully believe there have been such people, and moreover, that they are drawn from the life; but at all events these characters, dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love,' are such as this young girl knew, by the infallible genius that was in her, might and would exist under certain conditions of life and action. It is a fearful picture, but it is drawn with a deep miraculous knowledge of the human heart.

Of historians, the three whom the world ranks most highly are Hallam, Macaulay, and Carlyle; and these three seem to have been given to us for the purpose of showing in how different ways history may be written. Mr. Hallain, with a style chaste even to prudery, and a judgment impartial almost to a fault ;thoughtful, indeed, but thoughtful only about facts; treating all actions and events as matters of course neither strange, nor startling, nor affecting, and important only as generating certain other facts which we call social and political results; -so dry and cold that you shrink from contact with him, yet so useful and so sound that you avoid it at your peril. Lord Macaulay, the stately yet impetuous march of whose clear and brilliant narrative, coruscating with well-polished epigram and nicely-poised antithesis,all clinquant, all in gold,' carries you on with it by an irresistible impulse, yet wearies you at last by the very monotony of its elaborate excellence and the studied modulation of its vigorous and ringing tread;-Macaulay, with a keen eye for the picturesque, and a large share of that sort of poetic feeling which attained its perfection in Scott, recognising (like Hallam) the importance of events in their social and political aspect, and also (unlike Hallam) strongly affected by incidents in themselves, provided they are out of the common way, but seeing little to wonder at or to weep over in the ordinary course of that sorrowful mystery, the life of man, looking scarcely be

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yond the surface of things-hating all philosophies except those which minister to material welfare, despising ethics, sneering at metaphysics, barely tolerating creeds, and distributing praise or blame without hesitation and without stint under a strong party bias and from a standard of morality of the simplest and most conventional kind. And Mr. Carlyle-what shall we say of Carlyle?-writing an English exclusively his own, part German, part classical, part colloquial, part poetical-in itself a wonderful creation of genius, startling indeed to Edinburgh reviewers of the able article' order, and to old ladies who have no patience with such nonsense,' but digging up as it were and bringing to light from the depths of our glorious language a power and a beauty unknown before -valuing events not for the political or social, but for the human interest that is in them, and looking upon every action or event however or dinary with intense interest, curiosity, and almost awe, as matter for wonder, laughter, or tears; as 'a strange fact, not an unexampled one, for the strangest of all animals is man;' with a humour exuberant enough to rob history of her dignity, and a pathos and earnestness deep enough to restore it to her tenfold; with a jealous and passionate love and a quick and steady discernment of all that in human action is lovely and true and great, and a graphic power which causes scenes and persons to live and move before us as they never lived in history till now; with a turn of miud singularly unjudicial, yet a judgment of character eminently impartial because of the marvellous insight which he possesses into the secret chambers of the human heart. No question but of the three Carlyle comes nearest to the ideal of perfect history; and that is because Carlyle is a poet. Poetry, indeed, is not history, nor is history poetry ; and yet it is eternally true that, except by a poet, no perfect history can be written. For whatever other faculty she may require besides the poetic, a perception of the true character of events under all the aspects in which they would present themselves to the most perfectly organized

human intellect, a perception, that is,. of their poetic value, is essential to perfect history. And in this respect Mr. Carlyle stands far indeed above Hallam and Macaulay. Instances of this there can be no need to give; for proof of it you have only to open any page of the French Revolution or Frederick the Great. Take the defence of the Tuileries by the Swiss Guards. The whole scene is brought so vividly before you that you see and almost feel it the onward surging of the maddened multitude, and the terrible recoil of its foremost thousands as ever and anon a sheet of quick bright flame, followed by a long steady roll, gleams out from the

of

red Swiss rock' that bars their onset; and if this were all, perhaps Macaulay might have succeeded, not so well, certainly, but (let us say) half as well. But what Lord Macau lay could not have done was to show us, standing at a little distance, a thin pale individual, looking calmly and critically on that scene chaotic murder and madness, and thinking, in the passionless presence of mind that made Marengo and Austerlitz, that if they had been properly commanded, the Swiss would have won.' There is no reason to doubt that the individual was there; but only a man who had caught the true historic spirit could have made so much use of him. If any one wishes to obtain some idea of how history ought and also of how it ought not to be written, let him read with the first object Carlyle's account of the French Revolution and with the second Lamartine's.

It would appear that to repeat the trick which Boswell performed is not given to mortals, and that only one good biography was possible for man. Certainly our libraries do little to satisfy the public requirements in this direction; and yet, notwithstanding the encroachments of the utilitarian spirit, and in spite of that loss of individuality which is lamented by Mr. Mill, there has been no time when to all appearance people were so interesting to each other. Such biography as can be got is swallowed with avidity; and one

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small book (the Memoir of Hedley Vicars) has had a sale unprecedented in the annals of bibliopoly. The truth is, that to write satisfactorily the life of a man you must either be a Boswell or a genius. Of Boswell, Lord Macaulay says that he was a great writer because he was a fool. The meaning of this is that Boswell's simple-mindedness, or (as we say) silliness, saved him from the cynicism which is the bane of hero-worship; and his want of that keen sense of the ludicrous from which a higher order of mind is never free, allowed him to record without compunetion and in the utmost detail every incident, however trifling, in the life of his idol, as if it was a matter of grave historic importance. The consequence is, that the reader finds before him a vast mass of truthful materials, from which he gradually forms an idea of Johnson. Just idea of Johnson, or indeed any idea at all, except that he was a very large, wise, and wonderful man, who had a perfect right to be out of temper when you contradicted him, Boswell himself had not. A man possessed of the requisite genius, on the other hand, would have discarded an immense number of these details; but yet would have so managed as to give you his own idea (and that would have been a true one) of what Johnson really was in his outer and his inner life, in his moments of weakness and of strength, in appearance and reality, in temper, in gesture, in manner, in cast of countenance, in heart and in soul.

The requisite genius, however, and the requisite absence of genius, which seem to be the only possible conditions of good biography, seem also to be the rarest of all human things. In our time we have seve ral lives' and memoirs,' some of them-such as those of Wilberforce and Arnold-of the greatest inte rest, for they are of men who have left their mark upon the age; conscientious, able, and admirable works so far as they go, and entitling their authors to public gratitude. Mr.Carlyle's Life of Sterling, indeed, is something more than this, and