The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-09 00:00:00

lof William Allingbam. May it flourish there, aid
only be hidden at last by the bay leaves won in his
maturer manhood. Onward and Upward ! The ad-
vance cannot to him be one of difficulty—for it is
in his instance not among sterile cragi, but among
flowers and fountains, with verdure overhead and
underfoot ; and for his genius, has he not proved it
to be already at once supple, and agile, and mascu-
line ? And so let us bid a kindly adieu to William
Allingham, crying to him as we part, with tha
poet's pilgrim—Excelsior !

The Newcomes. No. XXIII. and XXIV. By W.
M. Thackeray.
Mr. Thackeray never wrote anything worthier
of the admiration of his readers—meaning, nowa-
days, the million—than this double number, which
brings hii noble serial story of "The Newcomes"
to a conclusion. We linger over it tenderly and
regretfully. Unwilling to be persuaded that all
is over in regard to that narrative, among whose
fluctuating incidents we have wandered so
pleasantly during the last two years, we are fain
still to believe ourselves observant of one of the
severer crises in the progress of its vicissitudes
rather than spectators of its actual termination.
Yet in spite of all our wishes to the contrary, it is
to us now but as a tale that is told. We must close
the last page of the last volume. It is finished.
It is completed. We have, as it were, in our hands,
the catalogue of births, deaths, and marriages.
Among the births, those of children to Clara, to
Rosey, to Laura, and to lesser heroines in the fie.
tion, leaving us marvelling over the sorrowful ex-
clamation of the Duo d'lvry to his poor good-
natured little oddity of a wife—" Ala ! pour-
quoi n'en avons-nous pas, Jeanne ? pourquoi
n'en n'avons-nous pas t" Among the deaths
those of grim old Lady Kew, of cordial
James Binnie, of heartless little Rosey, of our
gentle, 'noble, knightly, "preux chevalier, et parfait
gentilhomme," Colonel Thomas Newsome. Among
the marriages, besides the ill-starred nuptials
of Clive and Rosey, of Barnes and Clara, of the
last mentioned again (when divorced), with her
first flame Jack Belsize, Lord Highgate—besides
these we say, and the union of Lord Kew with
Clara's sister, and that of M. de Florae with a
daughter of the house of Higges, of Manchester,
I and that of Sir Barnes with somebody else (name
unknown), whom we are told, though we need
scarcely have been so incited, to hope with the
author that she avenges every one by bullying the
Baronet, her husband—beyond all these, we say, the
tardy but inevitable knitting together in wedlock of
the lives and fortunes of Clive and Ethel. Yes—all
our anticipations, aspirations, hopes, desires, in
their regard have been to the full at last mast hap-
pily realised. Rosey, as we have remarked, dies
—she dies in childbirth, through a paroxysm of
rage, jealousy, chagrin, despondency, and indig-
nation. Clive is left for a while to lavish all his
tenderness upon his little one—" Boy," otherwise
" Tommykin"—but not long afterwards is per-
mitted to share that love with another, the
darling of his boyhood, of his youth, of
his maturer years, Ethel, once the gay, now the
gentle, the tender, the loving, the love-worthy,
always the noble-hearted, noble-minded, still the
beautiful. They are united at last, but only when
the great joy of their union is saddened inexpres-
sibly by the knowledge that the noblest soul in all
the world is taken from them—the kindly, the
brave, the simple, the lofty spirit animating the
beloved familiar form of the grand old Colonel.
What appears to us the distinguishing peculiarity
of " The Newcomes"--which, by the way, with all
our admiration for "Vanity Fair," and all our