ers, have the very savour and tone of
Lever and James; but then the savour and the tone are not so piquant. I
know nothing in the way of imitation to equal Codlingsby, if it be not
The Tale of Drury Lane, by W. S. in the _Rejected Addresses_, of which
it is said that Walter Scott declared that he must have written it
himself. The scene between Dr. Franklin, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette,
and Tatua, the chief of the Nose-rings, as told in _The Stars and
Stripes_, is perfect in its way, but it fails as being a caricature of
Cooper. The caricaturist has been carried away beyond and above his
model, by his own sense of fun.

Of the ballads which appeared in _Punch_ I will speak elsewhere, as I
must give a separate short chapter to our author's power of
versification; but I must say a word of _The Snob Papers_, which were at
the time the most popular and the best known of all Thackeray's
contributions to _Punch_. I think that perhaps they were more charming,
more piquant, more apparently true, when they came out one after another
in the periodical, than they are now as collected together. I think that
one at a time would be better than many. And I think that the first half
in the long list of snobs would have been more manifestly snobs to us
than they are now with the second half of the list appended. In fact,
there are too many of them, till the reader is driven to tell himself
that the meaning of it all is that Adam's family is from first to last a
family of snobs. "First," says Thackeray, in preface, "the world was
made; then, as a matter of course, snobs; they existed for years and
years, and were no more known than America. But presently,--ingens
patebat tellus,--the people became darkly aware that there was such a
race. Not above five-and-twenty years since, a name, an expressive
monosyllable, arose to designate that case. That name has spread over
England like railroads subsequently; snobs are known and recognised
throughout an empire on which I am given to understand the sun never
sets. _Punch_ appears at the right season to chronicle their history;
and the individual comes forth to write that history in _Punch_.

"I have,--and for this gift I congratulate myself with a deep and
abiding thankfulness,--an eye for a snob. If the truthful is the
beautiful, it is beautiful to study even the snobbish;--to track snobs
through history as certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles;
to sink shafts in society, and come