The Sun.
London, England, 1855-11-09 00:00:00

TIIE 811141, i.0.;1/4DON FRIDAY
,_, 4

LITERATURE.

1 the Tremendous Adventures of Major Ga-
hagan, who that has once read them can have
forgotten the hero of the Boggicylval/ah
I tarkura the valiant G.O'G.G. M.H.E.I.C.S.
C.LH.A., otherwise Goliali O'Grady- Gabagan,
Major in the Honourable East India Company's
Service, Commanding Irregular Hoi!se Ahmed-
nnggar, whom we can fancy, by the way, hob-
nobbing in the shades with Parolles, and Pistol,
and Bobadil, and Bombastes, and Mimchausen—
eating fire by the chaldron and chewing leeks by
the waggon-load. In the freshened memory
of all which wonders about Gahagan, and
Stubbs, and Cox, and Molony, and Titmarsh—
after many a hearty laugh of unaffected apprecia-
tion—we close this book, thankful to the kindly
and sportive hand from which its contents origi-
nally emanated: as we do so wafting a benison of
gratitude across the broad bosom of the Atlantic
in the track of the author of " Vanity Fair" and
" The Newcomes," our wise and witty, clear-
sighted, gentle - hearted William Makepiece
Thackeray.

Miscellanies : Prose and Verse.. By W. M.

Thackeray. Vol. I.

Bradbury and Evans.

It was a happy thought, the celebration of the
close of Mr. Thackeray's Masterpiece by the publi-
cation in a collective form of his hitherto scattered
Miscellanies. Scarcely has our great novelist
brought to a conclusion his exquisite story of "The
Newcomes"—one of those remarkable novels of a
century in which we have as the Quarterly aptly
remarks in the language of armlet, " the very age
and body of the time, its form and pressure "
when there issues from the press the first of the
four volumes wherein are to be comprised the mis-
cellaneous productions contributed during past
years by the author of " Vanity Fair" to the pages
of our periodical literature. Writings these prove
to be, for the most part, penned by Mr. Thackeray
before he had given evidence of those extraordinary
powers which have placed him very recently in the
foremost rank among our contemporary Great Men
of Letters. Until the appearance of " Vanity
Fair" not any one among us could have had the
smallest notion of the genius lying dormant (com-
paratively speaking) in the heart and brain of that
gay, genial, humorous, delightful writer who had
been scribbling away so industriously for so long a
time in so many different publications, so often so
vary pleasantly, but so seldom until then rising at
all above the level of the talents of his clever and
motley collaborateurs. No sooner, however, had
we got tolerably well advanced in the "story with-
out a hero " than we all of us felt at once that after
all this was no common man; that hitherto we had
failed to recognise the true height and depth of his
capacities ; that at any rate, to say the least of it,
ho himself must have only just then for the
first time hit upon the right vein in
his intellect, that vein which Las since
proved to be so rich in the gold of wit and
the silver of satire, and in all those other pre-
cious products of the ore of genius, racy of the soil
from which they come, and since then run into so
many moulds of grace, or beauty, or grotesqueness,
and stamped with the timbre of a genuine and
authoritative originality. Mr. Thackeray, from
the date of his writing this initial chapter of his
first great work, became a Creator in the realms
of Fiction—poet in the true sense of the word—a
recognised chief in the phalanx of our national
literature. He came before us in a new form—no
longer as a raree-showman fingering the wires of
the puppets dancing behind the tiny footlights
and under the arch of the miniature proscenium,
or causing the parti-coloured shadows of the baker,
and the devil, and the little old woman, and good
master Punchinello, to glide across the white sheets
(of paper) according to the movement of the slides
in his magic-lantern—rather now it seemed as some
potent magician of the ink-horn, surrounded by
the spirits he had summoned into being at the
beck of a simple wand enough, the waving of a
wizard goosequill. Another Prospero, attended
by his dainty Ariel, and his loathsome Caliban,
and his.abominable Sycorax. " Vanity Fair"—the
first of the wierd circles traced out by his wand of
power (the pen) showed us within its circumference
a crowd of new and extraordinary existences.
Among them Becky Sharp, the clever and dotes-
table—Rawdon Crawley, with the tender, human
heart in the body of a callous blackleg—William
Dobbin, honest dunce with the gentle nature and
the splay feet—the Most Honourable the Marquis
of Steyne, the living satyr of the book, clad in the
trappings of a patrician, and animated by the soul
of a blackguard—these, with their throng of
strange companions, carrying us to Russell-square,
and Park-lane, and Crawley-court, and the field
of Waterloo, to London, and Brussels, and Chelten •
ham. " Pendennis" we remember, of course, as the
next of these same weird circles—the one which
brought us acquainted with the coxcomb Arthur,
and the tuft-hunting Major, and the gentle mo-
ther, and the sweet cousin, and drunk old Costi-
gan, and vulgar little Foker, the brewer's son, and
the beautiful Fotheringay, and the pretty detes-
table Blanche Amory (a sort of Becky Sharp be-
dizened in gauze and crinoline), and queer rusty
Bows, the love-sick fiddler, and that glorious ace
of trumps George Warrington. Lastly, have we
not watched the shifting groups in that amplest
and most deftly defined circle amongst them all, the
one bringing under our observation and within
reach of our familiar knowledge the very respect-
able family of " The Newccmes," together with
the mob of their many friends and acquaintances ?
An enumeration of their mere names will be suffi-
cient, so fresh are they all just now in the popular
recollection—Ethel, Clive, Barnes, Hobson, Sir
Brian, Lady Anne, and, beyond all, Colonel Thomas
Ne weome (noblest of the noble creations of the genius
of Mr. Thackeray), together with whom are remem-
bered J . J., and F. 8., and Miss Honeyman, and
the Rev. Charles, and Sherrick, and Madame De
Florae, and Jack Belsize, and the Marquis of
Farintesh, and the Prince de Moncontour, and with
these and many others, including Rosa, mid Clara,
and Lady Kew, and drs. Mackenzie, the dear old
familiar faces of Laura, and George Warrington,
and Arthur Pendennis. Between whiles, too, since
the days of " Vanity Fair," have we not had, un-
der the guidance of Mr. Thackeray, in "Esmond," a
glimpse, and that, moreover, a very wonderful
glimpse, at the style of society as it must have ap-
peared in the reign of her late Majesty Queen
Anne, a hundred and fifty years gone by ? Be-
sides having a peep at the phantom features
of our incomparable humourists of the last cen-
tury—Fielding, and Addison, and Steele, and
Swift, and divers other contemporary votaries of
Momus, and tributaries of prose and verse to Pas-
quin on his pedestal ? Now that the more memo-
rable of the literary enterprises of Mr. Thackeray
have been crowned by his magnum opus, of " The
Neweomes," it. is well that we should be afforded
the luxury of marking the growth of our author's
genius, of estimating the altitude which his intel-
lectual poWers have attained since the time when
we laughed over his pages idly and lightly as over
those of some merely ephemeral feuilletonist. That
luxury is now thoroughly enjoyable through the
medium of this first delightful volume of his
" Miscellanies." Three others are to follow
in due season ; so that by the time this
varied and amusing collection of hitherto scattered
writings shall have been completed, we shall have
revived our acquaintance with all those motley
noms de plume which have been in turns the masks
and dominoes of William Thackeray. Yellowplush
Fitzboodle —Fat Contributor Bashi-bazouk
Snob—Jeames—Policeman X—Molony of Kil-
ballymolony—and above all our comical old friend
with the moon-face and the barnacles, hight
Michael Angelo Titmarsh. Gathered together
from all sorts of well-known and out-of-the-way
periodicals, these four volumes of " Miscellanies :
Prose and Terse : by W. M. Thackeray,"
will supply us in a great measure, cream
skimmed from the via lactea of our popular
periodicals stretching across the firmament of con-
temporary literature—from the Times, and Punch,
and Fraser, and many other daily, weekly, and
monthly publications of note, not forgetting, be-
sides these, let us hope, ono or two brilliant papers
contributed by the same industrious hand to the
more ponderous pages of the Quarterly. To volume
one of this attractive collection of "Miscellanies"
we are indebted for a complete assemblage of the
lyrical productions of our eminent satirist, including,
among them, besides, seventeen " Ballads," and two
' •Love Songs made Ea,sy,"andfour"GermanDitties,"
and one "Imitation of Horace," and four metri-
cal scraps from the portfolio of Titmarsh, under
the title of " An old Friend with a new Face," the
five famous " poems" of the Malony of Kilbaliy-
molony, and the nine wonderful " Ballads of
Policeman X," followed by the half-jocose, half-
pathetic copy of verses, entitled " The End of the
Play," appended to one of the liveliest of Mr.
Thackeray's Christmas books. Shall we confess it ?
—however—these verses appear to us, for the
most part, very unworthy indeed of Mr. Thackeray.
Tapidist of all vapid, vulgar doggrel, for example,
to our thinking, are the preposterous ballads of
Policeman X ! Whether we turn to " The Wofle
New Ballad of Jane Roney and Mary Brown," or
to " The Three (dreary) Christmas Waits," or to
the " Ballad of Eliza Davis," or to " The Lament-
able Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditch."
Their only fun seems to us to consist in the absur-
dities of certain elliptic freaks of orthography.
Bettor than which—vastly—is the wonderful spell-
ing of the Oirish brogue in the lays of the great
Malony of Kilballymolony. Oirish-English as
astonishingly delightful in its way as the won-
drous French-English of Monsieur Paul de
Florae, Prince de Moncontour ! After these
forty-three ;metrical effusions come the forty-
six chapters of the wise and witty " Book of
Snobs," followed in their turn by the nine " Tre-
mendous Adventures of Major Gahagan ""—the
entire volume being completed by the horrid
record of " The Fatal Boots," and the laughable
memoranda jotted down in " Cox's Diary." The
last-mentioned jeu d' esprit recounting the ludi-
crous solecisms perpetrated by Coxe Tuggeridge
Coxe, of Portland-place and Tuggeridgeville,
Surrey, Esquire, during the brief interval
of triumph when he was something grander
than a hair-dresser of Oxford-market: the detest-
able memorial of the " Fatal Boots," presenting to
the reader various passages in the history of Bob
Stubbs of the North Bungay Fencibles, otherwise
Lord Cornwallis, the most abominable little wretch
ever blessed with a pair of knock-knees, ditto of
eyes atrociously squinting, together with hair of an
emnistakeable earrotty red, and a heart more a
dirty little bit of leather than a wholesome human
organ, capable of being the receptacle of any
o the hoblez emotions or affections, As to

Villette. By Currey Bell. A New Edition.

- Smith, Elder, and Co. •
Charlotte Bronte's three celebrated stories are
now published in a popular form, each. complete in
a single volume—" Jane Eyre "—" Shirley"—and
" Villette." The last in its new shape has but just
made its welcome appearance. Through this edi-
tion many fresh admirers of Currer Bell may be
tempted to enlarge their imaginary acquaintance
in the realms of fairyland by taking into their
hearts, or rather embalming in their memories,
fresh existences like thrifty, prying, unscrupulous
Madame Beck—good, handsome, yellow-haired
lion-headed Dr. John—quiet, plain, observant
Lucy Suowe—giddy, pretty, empty-headed Ge-
nevra Fansh awe—beautiful, quaint, elf-like Pauliva
(Lb Baiaompierre—beyond all, the lean, bright-eyed,
passionate Monsieur Paul Emanuel, with his black
hair glistening like a raven's wing, and his cigar
burning redly in the twilight, and his shabby coat
flapping in the wind as he moves about the garden
with the great watering-pot, watering his bloved
flowers, followed everywhere by the little pit-pat
of the tiny dog that loves him almost as well as
the watchful Lucy, hi i away there in the dim
background ! Life-like forms they all are, moving
before us about that green Belgian landscape, or
among the staid gray houses of queer old tranquil
Villette. We.turn the pages of the tale now with
somewhat different emotionefrom those experienced
when the first edition of the work was published
and perused. Since then the writer of "Jane
Eyre," and " Shirley," and " Villette,” has herself
passed away from the scene like a tale that is told,
and praise and blame must alike in, her regard,
sound now only in the dull cold ear of death. Three
works alone she wrote, if we except her share of
the " Poems" issued from the press some few years
back by those three strange sisters, Charlotte,
Emily, and Anne Bronte, Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell, as they called themselves—who have all in
this brief interval appeared and disappeared so
mysteriously. Peace to their manes ! One, at
least, among their number has left us in that clever,
morbid, enthralling novel of " Jane Eyre," a work
that will live, and mostly for the sake of which the
readers of Currer Bell still bear " Shirley' and
" Villette" in somewhat vivid remembrance.

The Double Marriage. By Mrs. La Touche.
3 vols. Hurst and Blackett.

This is a story that displays skill and ingenuity ;
the spirit that pervades it is melancholy, although
not of a morbid tendency. The point of the narra-
tive is that of a double marriage contracted by Sir
Geoffrey Willoughby. The perpetrator of this
wickedness never appears on the scene, he is in
India, and little is said of him. Una de resei, the
daughter of Lady Camolin, was the ill-fated second
wife ; she is the heroine, and a most interesting
one, from her grace, her gentleness, and goodness.
She had no one to instruct her youth in the best
knowledge, or fortify her mind for life's trials. She
had to sustain unaided the severest sufferings as a
wife and a mother, with only her own sense of
right to uphold her, and-her own faith to be her
hguidinHeero mother
daughter's was
marrying
lyand
prowl,
proud she
ad insisted n her
as
she thought, and Una, who was easily guided, and
innocent and ignorant of the wicked world, con-
sented. After four years spent in India she re-
turned to England with her son, for the benefit of
her health. Then her real troubles began. In India
she had suffered greatly, but when again at home
she felt all the keenness of the pain of parting that
hung over her. Too late she found what she had
forfeited, a life of peace, for what 11 It needed not
imagination to pourtray, or a nervous fancy to
picture ; too well she knew what was before her.
Una is here called a martyr, and she seemed to lay
claim to the name, for she suffered in silence with
patience and prayer. The tale of Dora Fleming,
the first wife, is ingeniously interwoven with
the course of events ; and the climax of the confu-
sion, when the news of Sir Geoffrey's death is sent
by electric telegraph on board the vessel bound for
India, in which the two unfortunate victims were
about to sail, is a most exciting passage, and is told
with feeling and force. After so many scenes of
agony and hours of weary anxiety and suspense
it is but a natural termination to see Una consigned
to an early grave. It has been said that sorrow
does not kill, but that is the sorrow spread over a
lifetime, with glimpses of light and intervals of
rest. The sorrow that was laid on Una was crush-
ing and overwhelming ; it was not in human nature
to revive after a youth so overcast, and summer
was not to succeed to a blighted spring. There
were painful family scenes to add to the other
miseries, and through all Una was herself calm
and composed. Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
and all her paths are peace, is written of the spirit
whose guiding influence informed and inspired our
heroine, and Una left behind her to linger
in the memory of her friends a vision of their
past agency and a promise of their future fulfil-
ment. Of those who surrounded her no such
words could be spoken. Her brother Alan
was an instance of reckless self-indulgence and
ungoverned passion • his career was stormy,
and his end awful. No interest can be felt for
him, and it is only when his path intersects that of
Florence that regret is felt for him. It seems cruel
to see so fair a course overshadowed by so dark a
destiny. Camolin, the elder brother, was very
different, but he is not so often met with ; he is
reserved, and delicate health rendered him still
more a contrast to his eager and impetuous brother.
Lady Camolin is a decided sketch, and her grief at
the end of her brilliant son in so disgraceful a man-
ner, and with so awful a deed, is truly described.
Arthur Winton is an extraordinary character, but
he is not interesting, from his fitful variations and
inconsistent conduct. Mary Stanfield is a relief, in
her simplicity and steadfastness, to the more showy
but unsubstantial personages around her. The
conclusion is calm after all the storms, and with
the exception of Winton and Florence being united,
which destroys the illusion of his devoted attach-
ment, it is satisfactory. A striking instance of the
difference of adverse dispositions is shown in Una
and Dora—one all impatience and violence, the
ether serene and dignified. All the sympathy is
enlisted on the side of Una, while Dora, with all
her wrongs, scarcely gains pity. The painful is
inseparably connected with a subject like the one
before us, but it is divested of its horrors by the pre-
sence of one so exalted and superior as the heroine.
She is eminently calculated to adorn any position,
and to render interesting any narrative of facts and
combination of fiction.