instant frolic. It was these attributes combined which made
him of all satirists the most humorous, and of all humorists the most
satirical. It was these that produced the Osbornes, the Dobbins, the
Pens, the Clives, and the Newcomes, whom, when he loved them the most,
he could not save himself from describing as mean and unworthy. A
somewhat heroic hero of romance,--such a one, let us say, as Waverley,
or Lovel in _The Antiquary_, or Morton in _Old Mortality_,--was
revolting to him, as lacking those foibles which human nature seemed to
him to demand.

The story ends with two sad tragedies, neither of which would have been
demanded by the story, had not such sadness been agreeable to the
author's own idiosyncrasy. The one is the ruin of the old colonel's
fortunes, he having allowed himself to be enticed into bubble
speculations; and the other is the loss of all happiness, and even
comfort, to Clive the hero, by the abominations of his mother-in-law.
The woman is so iniquitous, and so tremendous in her iniquities, that
she rises to tragedy. Who does not know Mrs. Mack the Campaigner? Why at
the end of his long story should Thackeray have married his hero to so
lackadaisical a heroine as poor little Rosey, or brought on the stage
such a she-demon as Rosey's mother? But there is the Campaigner in all
her vigour, a marvel of strength of composition,--one of the most
vividly drawn characters in fiction;--but a woman so odious that one is
induced to doubt whether she should have been depicted.

The other tragedy is altogether of a different kind, and though
unnecessary to the story, and contrary to that practice of story-telling
which seems to demand that calamities to those personages with whom we
are to sympathise should not be brought in at the close of a work of
fiction, is so beautifully told that no lover of Thackeray's work would
be willing to part with it. The old colonel, as we have said, is ruined
by speculation, and in his ruin is brought to accept the alms of the
brotherhood of the Grey Friars. Then we are introduced to the Charter
House, at which, as most of us know, there still exists a brotherhood of
the kind. He dons the gown,--this old colonel, who had always been
comfortable in his means, and latterly apparently rich,--and occupies
the single room, and eats the doled bread, and among his poor brothers
sits in the chapel of his order. The description is perhaps as fine as
anything that Thackeray ever did. Th