the trace of a powerful mind; but it is a mind laughing at its own creatures, at itself, at us. Lothair would be a work of art, if it were explicitly presented as a burlesque, such as was The Infernal Marriage, or if we did not know that it was written to pass the time by one who had ruled this great empire for years, and who within a few years more was destined to rule it again.  It was a fanciful and almost sympathetic satire on the selfish fatuity of the noble, wealthy, and governing orders of British society.  But then the author of this burlesque was himself about to ask these orders to admit him to their select ranks, and to enthrone him as their acknowledged chief.

As the rancour of party feeling that has gathered round the personality of Beaconsfield subsides, and as time brings new proofs of the sagacity of the judgments with which Benjamin Disraeli analysed the political traditions of British society, we may look for a fresh growth of the popularity of the trilogy and Lothair.  England will one day be as just, as America has always been, to one of our wittiest writers.  He will one day be formally admitted into the ranks of the Men of Letters.  He has hitherto been kept outside, in a sense, partly by his being a prominent statesman and party chief, partly by his incurable tone of mind with its Semitic and non-English ways, partly by his strange incapacity to acquire the nuances of pure literary English.  No English writer of such literary genius slips so often into vulgarisms, solecisms, archaisms, and mere slip-shod gossip.  But these are after all quite minor defects.  His books, even his worst books, abound in epigrams, pictures, characters, and scenes of rare wit.  His painting of parliamentary life in England has neither equal nor rival.  And his reflections on English society and politics reveal the insight of vast experience and profound genius.

V

W. M. THACKERAY

The literary career of William Makepeace Thackeray has not a few special features of its own that it is interesting to note at once.  Of all the more eminent writers of the Victorian Age, his life was the shortest:  he died in 1863 at the age of fifty-two, the age of Shakespeare.  His literary career of twenty-six years was shorter than that of Carlyle, of Macaulay, Disraeli, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Froude, or Ruskin.  It opened with the reign of the Queen, almost in the very year of Pickwick, whose author stood beside his grave and lived and wrote for some years more.  But these twenty-six years of Thackeray’s era of production were full of wonderful activity, and have left us as many volumes of rich and varied genius.  And the most striking feature of all is this—­that in these twenty-six full volumes in so many modes, prose, verse, romance, parody, burlesque, essay, biography, criticism, there are hardly more than one or two which can be put aside as worthless and as utter failures; very few fail in his consummate mastery of style; few can be said to be irksome to read, to re-read, and to linger over in the reading.