d plot. And though the narratives be vague, the
characters are alive. In _The Virginians_, the two young men and their
mother, and the other ladies with whom they have to deal, and especially
their aunt, the Baroness Bernstein, are all alive. For desultory
reading, for that picking up of a volume now and again which requires
permission to forget the plot of a novel, this novel is admirably
adapted. There is not a page of it vacant or dull. But he who takes it
up to read as a whole, will find that it is the work of a desultory
writer, to whom it is not infrequently difficult to remember the
incidents of his own narrative. "How good it is, even as it is!--but if
he would have done his best for us, what might he not have done!" This,
I think, is what we feel when we read _The Virginians_. The author's
mind has in one way been active enough,--and powerful, as it always is;
but he has been unable to fix it to an intended purpose, and has gone on
from day to day furthering the difficulty he has intended to master,
till the book, under the stress of circumstances,--demands for copy and
the like,--has been completed before the difficulty has even in truth
been encountered.

CHAPTER VI.

THACKERAY'S BURLESQUES.

As so much of Thackeray's writing partakes of the nature of burlesque,
it would have been unnecessary to devote a separate chapter to the
subject, were it not that there are among his tales two or three so
exceedingly good of their kind, coming so entirely up to our idea of
what a prose burlesque should be, that were I to omit to mention them I
should pass over a distinctive portion of our author's work.

The volume called _Burlesques_, published in 1869, begins with the
_Novels by Eminent Hands_, and _Jeames's Diary_, to which I have already
alluded. It contains also _The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan_,
_A Legend of the Rhine_, and _Rebecca and Rowena_. It is of these that I
will now speak. _The History of the Next French Revolution_ and _Cox's
Diary_, with which the volume is concluded, are, according to my
thinking, hardly equal to the others; nor are they so properly called
burlesques.

Nor will I say much of Major Gahagan, though his adventures are very
good fun. He is a warrior,--that is, of course,--and he is one in whose
wonderful narrative all that distant India can produce in the way of
boasting, is superadded to Ireland's best efforts in the same line.
Baron Munchausen was nothing to him