AQUARELLE EDITION.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PHOTOGRAVURES BY THE GEBBIE & HUSSON COMPANY, LIMITED, from ORIGINAL PAINTINGS BY RENOWNED ARTISTS OF ALL NATIONS.

THE LIBRARY

OF

CHOICE LITERATURE.

him a varied experience, first of fortune and then of po

| during their last unlucky season in London, and had expressed himself no better satis fied with Sir Francis and Lady Clavering and her ladyship's daughter than was the public in general. "The world is right," George said, "about those people. The

THE WORLD BEHIND THE SCENES. [WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, born at Calcutta, 1811, died in London, Dec. 24, 1863. His father was in the East India civil service, to which may be due many life-like pictures in his writings. His early life brought verty. The study of art took him for years to the Con-young men laugh and talk freely before tinent, and at the age of thirty he took up the profession of authorship, writing copiously for Punch and Fraser's Magazine. His first notable work of fiction, Vanity Fair, appeared in 1846-7, and his Lectures on English Humorists and on the Four Georges, wrought out with rare literary skill, were delivered to admiring audiences in England and America from 1851 to 1856. The Cornhill Magazine began in 1860 under Thackeray's editorship, and quickly ran to the unprecedented circulation of over 100,000 copies. In person Thackeray was tall, massivebrained, and commanding with genial and kindly manners. His place in the literature of the nineteenth cen

tury is a high one, and the title unquestionably belongs to him of the first satirist of the age. Nowhere are to be found such pictures of the meanness, selfishness, and heartless servility of society to rank and money, combined with skilful and masterly portraitures of noble and kindly men, and devoted, unselfish women. The

style of Thackeray is his own, always pure, free and flowing, refined, yet forcible, while his delicate and subtile humor, frequently sportive, but never too broad, enlivens all his books, which are not wanting also in the

deepest pathos, lofty morality and sometimes tragic

those ladies, and about them. The girl sees people whom she has no right to know, and talks to men with whom no girl should have an intimacy. Did you see those two reprobates leaning over Lady Clavering's carriage in the Park the other day, and leering under Miss Blanche's bonnet? No good mother would let her daughter know those men, or admit them within her doors."

"The Begum is the most innocent and good-natured soul alive," interposed Pen. She never heard any harm of Captain Blackball, or read that trial in which Charley Lovelace figures. Do you suppose that honest ladies read and remember the Chronique Scandaleuse as well as you, you old grumbler?"

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those fellows?" Warrington asked, his face
"Would you like Laura Bell to know
turning rather red. Would
you let
any
woman you loved be contaminated by their
company? I have no doubt that poor Be-
gum is ignorant of their histories. It seems
to me she is ignorant of a great number
of better things. It seems to me that your
honest Begum is not a lady, Pen. It is not
her fault, doubtless, that she has not had
the education or learned the refinements of
a lady."

"She is as moral as Lady Portsea, who has all the world at her balls, and as refined as Mrs. Bull, who breaks the king's English, and has half a dozen dukes at her table," Pen answered, rather sulkily. Why should you and I be more squeamish than the rest of the world? Why are we to visit the sins of her fathers on this harmless, kind crea

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1

ture? She never did anything but kind- |
ness to you or any mortal soul. As far as
she knows, she does her best. She does not
set up to be more than she is. She gives
you the best dinners she can buy, and the
best company she can get. She pays the
debts of that scamp of a husband of hers.
She spoils her boy like the most virtuous
mother in England. Her opinion about lit-
erary matters, to be sure is not much; and
I dare say she never read a line of Words-
worth, or heard of Tennyson in her life."

"No more has Mrs. Flanagan the laundress," growled out Pen's Mentor; "no more has Betty, the housemaid; and I have no word of blame against them. But a high-souled man doesn't make friends of these. A gentleman doesn't choose these for his companions, or bitterly rues it afterwards if he do. Are you, who are setting up to be a man of the world and a philosopher, to tell me that the aim of life is to guttle three courses and dine off silver? Do you dare to own to yourself that your ambition in life is good claret, and that you'll dine with any, provided you get a stalled ox to feed on? You call me a Cynic-why, what a monstrous Cynicism it is, which you and the rest of you men of the world admit! I'd rather live upon raw turnips and sleep in a hollow tree, or turn backwoodsman or savage, than degrade myself to this civilization, and own that a French cook was the thing in life best worth living for."

"Because you like raw beef-steak and a pipe afterwards," broke out Pen, "you give yourself airs of superiority over people whose tastes are more dainty, and are not ashamed of the world they live in. Who goes about professing particular admiration, or esteem or friendship, or gratitude, even for the people one meets every day? If A. asks me to his house, and gives me his best, I take his good things for what they are worth and no more. I do not profess to pay him back in friendship, but in the convention's money of society. When we part, we part without any grief. When we meet, we are tolerably glad to see one another. If I were only to live with my friends, your black muzzle, old George, is the only face I should see."

"You are your uncle's pupil," said Warrington rather sadly; "and you speak like a worldling."

"And why not?" asked Pendennis; "why not acknowledge the world I stand upon, and submit to the conditions of the society which we live in and live by? I am older

than you, George, in spite of your grizzled whiskers, and have seen much more of the world than you have in your garret here, shut up with your books and your reveries and your ideas of one-and-twenty. I say, I take the world as it is, and being of it will not be ashamed of it. If the time is out of joint, have I any calling or strength to set it right?"

"Indeed, I don't think you have much of either," growled Pen's interlocutor.

"If I doubt whether I am better than my neighbor," Arthur continued," If I concede that I am no better,-I also doubt whether he is better than I. I see men who begin with ideas of universal reform, and who, before their beards are grown, propound their loud plans for the regeneration of mankind, give up their schemes after a few years of bootless talking and vainglorious attempts to lead their fellows; and after they have found that men will no longer hear them, as indeed they never were in the least worthy to be heard, sink quietly into the rank and file,-acknowledging their aims impracticable, or thankful that they were never put into practice. The fiercest reformers grow calm, and are fain to put up with things as they are: the loudest Radical orators become dumb, quiescent placemen: the most fervent Liberals when out of power, become humdrum Conservatives, or downright tyrants or despots in office. Look at Thiers, look at Guizot, in opposition and in place! Look at the Whigs appealing to the country, and the Whigs in power! Would you say that the conduct of these men is an act of treason, as the Radicals bawl,-who would give way in their turn, were their turn ever to come? No, only that they submit to circumstances which are stronger than they,march as the world marches towards reform, but at the world's pace (and the movements of the vast body of mankind must needs be slow),-forego this scheme as impracticable, on account of opposition, that as immature, because against the sense of the majority, are forced to calculate drawbacks and diffi culties, as well as to think of reforms and advances, and compelled finally to submit, and to wait and to compromise."

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The Right honorable Arthur Pendennis could not speak better, or be more satisfied with himself, if he was first Lord of the Treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer," Warrington said.

Self-satisfied? Why self-satisfied?" continued Pen. "It seems to me that my