of florins, and challenged our
bank to play against the sealed bags, what did we ask? 'Sir,' said we,
'we have but eighty thousand florins in bank, or two hundred thousand at
three months. If your highness's bags do not contain more than eighty
thousand we will meet you.' And we did; and after eleven hours' play,
in which our bank was at one time reduced to two hundred and three
ducats, we won seventeen thousand florins of him. Is _this_ not
something like boldness? Does this profession not require skill, and
perseverance, and bravery? Four crowned heads looked on at the game, and
an imperial princess, when I turned up the ace of hearts and made
Paroli, burst into tears. No man on the European Continent held a higher
position than Redmond Barry then; and when the Duke of Courland lost he
was pleased to say that we had won nobly. And so we had, and spent nobly
what we won." This is very grand, and is put as an eloquent man would
put it who really wished to defend gambling.

The rascal, of course, comes to a miserable end, but the tone of the
narrative is continued throughout. He is brought to live at last with
his old mother in the Fleet prison, on a wretched annuity of fifty
pounds per annum, which she has saved out of the general wreck, and
there he dies of delirium tremens. For an assumed tone of continued
irony, maintained through the long memoir of a life, never becoming
tedious, never unnatural, astounding us rather by its naturalness, I
know nothing equal to _Barry Lyndon_.

As one reads, one sometimes is struck by a conviction that this or the
other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged. There
is a gusto about his passages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in
the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may
so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader
feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written. He
has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or
doubt; and the words have come readily to him. So it has been with
_Barry Lyndon_. "My mind was filled full with those blackguards,"
Thackeray once said to a friend. It is easy enough to see that it was
so. In the passage which I have above quoted, his mind was running over
with the idea that a rascal might be so far gone in rascality as to be
in love with his own trade.

This was the last of Thackeray's long stories in _Fraser_. I have given
by no