THE GEORGES.—­While he was writing The Newcomes, he had prepared a course of four lectures on the Four Georges, kings of England, with which he made his second visit to the United States, and which he delivered in the principal cities, to make a fund for his daughters and for his old age.  It was entirely successful, and he afterwards read them in England and Scotland.  They are very valuable historically, as they give us the truth with regard to men whose reigns were brilliant and on the whole prosperous, but who themselves, with the exception of the third of the name, were as bad men as ever wore crowns.  George III. was continent and honest, but a maniac, and Mr. Thackeray has treated him with due forbearance and eulogy.

In 1857, Mr. Thackeray was a candidate for Parliament from Oxford, but was defeated by a small majority; his conduct in the election was so magnanimous, that his defeat may be regarded as an advantage to his reputation.

In the same year he began The Virginians, which may be considered his failure; it is historically a continuation of Esmond,—­some of the English characters, the Esmonds in Virginia, being the same as in that work.  But his presentation and estimate of Washington are a caricature, and his sketch of General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, is tame and untrue to life.  His descriptions of Virginia colonial life are unlike the reality; but where he is on his own ground, describing English scenes and customs in that day, he is more successful.  To paint historical characters is beyond the power of his pencil, and his Doctor Johnson is not the man whom Boswell has so successfully presented.

In 1860 he originated the Cornhill Magazine, to which his name gave unusual popularity:  it attained a circulation of one hundred thousand—­unprecedented in England.  In that he published Lovel the Widower, which was not much liked, and a charming reproduction of the Newcomes,—­for it is nothing more,—­entitled The Adventures of Philip on His Way through the World.  Philip is a more than average Englishman, with a wicked father and rather a stupid wife; but “the little sister” is a star—­there is no finer character in any of his works. Philip, in spite of its likeness to The Newcomes, is a delightful book.

With an achieved fame, a high position, a home which he had just built at Kensington, a large income, he seemed to have before him as prosperous an old age as any one could desire, when, such are the mysteries of Providence, he was found dead in his room on the morning of December 24, 1863.