for existence, except that the Hobson Newcomes dwelt there?  Are the chambers of Captain Costigan forgotten by the memory of any man, or those of Pen and George Warrington?  But Pen took better rooms, not so lofty, when he scored that success with “Walter Lorraine.”  Where did Mr. Bowes, the hopeless admirer of the Fotheringay, dwell?  Every one should know, but that question might puzzle some.  Or where was the lair of the Mulligan?  Like the grave of Arthur, or of Moliere, it is unknown; the whole of the postal district known as W. is haunted by that tremendous shade.  “I live there,” says he, pointing down towards Uxbridge with the big stick he carries; so his abode is in that direction, at any rate.  No more has been given to man to know.

Many minor reminiscences occur to the mind.  In Pump Court we encounter the brisk little spectre of Mr. Frederick Minchin, and who can forget that his club was The Oxford and Cambridge, than which what better could he desire?  Mr. Thackeray himself was a member of The Garrick, The Athenaeum, and The Reform, but the clubs of many of his characters, like the “buth” of Jeames Yellowplush, are “wrapped up in a mistry.”  They are alluded to by fancy names, but the scholiast on Thackeray will probably be able to identify them.  Is it not time, by the way, for that scholiast to give his labours to the public?  Thackeray’s world is passing; the children he knew, the boys he tipped and took to the play, are middle-aged men—­fogies, in fact. Tempus edax rerum, Time has an appetite as good as that of a boy at his first club dinner.  The meaning of the great writer’s contemporary allusions may be lost, like those of Villon and Aristophanes.  Such is the fate of comedy.  Who knows, if we turn to Dickens, what the “common profeel machine” was, or what were the steps of the dance known as the Fanteag (the spelling is dubious); or what the author meant by a “red-faced Nixon.”  Was it a nixie?  Does the new Professor of the English Language and Literature at Oxford hope to cast the light of Teutonic research on these and similar inquiries?  Sam Weller found that oysters always went hand-in-hand with poverty.  How this must astonish a generation which finds the oyster nearly as extinct as the ichthyosaurus!  The “Book of Snobs” calls aloud for a commentator.  Who is the nobleman holding his boots out of the hotel window—­an act which the Snob very properly declined to classify as snobbish?  Who are the originals of Henry Foker (this, indeed, is known), and of Wagg and Wenham?  Or did Wenham’s real name rhyme to Foker, as, according to the Mulligan, “Perkins rhymes to Jerkins, my man of firkins”?  Posterity will insist on an answer, which will be nothing if not authentic.  Posterity, pace Mr. Rideing, will remember very well that George Osborne’s father lived in Russell Square, and will hunt in vain for 96.  There is no such number, any more than there ever was such a Pope as he to whom the unfortunate old woman in “Candid” attributed her birth.  Here once more, as Voltaire justly remarks in a footnote, we observe the discretion of our author.