Whence that part of the romantic interlude dealing with the stay in the Duchy of X——­, dealt with in chapter x., etc., was inspired, Thackeray’s own note\books (as quoted by Mrs Ritchie) conclusively show:  ’January 4,1844.  Read in a silly book called L’EMPIRE, a good story about the first K. of Wurtemberg’s wife; killed by her husband for adultery.  Frederic William, born in 1734 (?), m. in 1780 the Princess Caroline of Brunswick Wolfenbuttel, who died the 27th September 1788.  For the rest of the story see L’EMPIRE, Ou DIX ANS Sous Napoleon, par un CHAMBELLAN:  Paris, Allardin, 1836; vol. i. 220.’  The ‘Captain Freny’ to whom Barry owed his adventures on his journey to Dublin (chapter iii.) was a notorious highwayman, on whose doings Thackeray had enlarged in the fifteenth chapter of his Irish sketch book.

Despite the slowness with which it was written, and the seeming neglect with which it was permitted to remain unreprinted, Barry Lyndon was to be hailed by competent critics as one of Thackeray’s finest performances, though the author himself seems to have had no strong regard for the story.  His daughter has recorded, ’My father once said to me when I was a girl:  “You needn’t read Barry Lyndon, you won’t like it.”  Indeed, it is scarcely a book to like, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power and mastery.’  Another novelist, Anthony Trollope, has said of it:  ’In imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity, Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than Barry Lyndon.’  Mr Leslie Stephen says:  ’All later critics have recognised in this book one of his most powerful performances.  In directness and vigour he never surpassed it.’

W.J.

The Memoires of Barry Lyndon, Esq.

CHAPTER I

MY PEDIGREE AND FAMILY—­UNDERGO THE INFLUENCE OF THE TENDER PASSION

Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it.  Ever since ours was a family (and that must be very near Adam’s time,—­so old, noble, and illustrious are the Barrys, as everybody knows) women have played a mighty part with the destinies of our race.

I presume that there is no gentleman in Europe that has not heard of the house of Barry of Barryogue, of the kingdom of Ireland, than which a more famous name is not to be found in Gwillim or D’Hozier; and though, as a man of the world, I have learned to despise heartily the claims of some pretenders to high birth who have no more genealogy than the lacquey who cleans my boots, and though I laugh to utter scorn the boasting of many of my countrymen, who are all for descending from kings of Ireland, and talk of a domain no bigger than would feed a pig as if it were a principality; yet truth compels me