e led us that day.

And so it goes on. I will not continue the stanza, because it contains
the worst rhyme that Thackeray ever permitted himself to use. _The
Chronicle of the Drum_ has not the finish which he achieved afterwards,
but it is full of national feeling, and carries on its purpose to the
end with an admirable persistency;

A curse on those British assassins
Who ordered the slaughter of Ney;
A curse on Sir Hudson who tortured
The life of our hero away.
A curse on all Russians,--I hate them;
On all Prussian and Austrian fry;
And, oh, but I pray we may meet them
And fight them again ere I die.

_The White Squall_,--which I can hardly call a ballad, unless any
description of a scene in verse may be included in the name,--is surely
one of the most graphic descriptions ever put into verse. Nothing
written by Thackeray shows more plainly his power over words and rhymes.
He draws his picture without a line omitted or a line too much, saying
with apparent facility all that he has to say, and so saying it that
every word conveys its natural meaning.

When a squall, upon a sudden,
Came o'er the waters scudding;
And the clouds began to gather,
And the sea was lashed to lather,
And the lowering thunder grumbled,
And the lightning jumped and tumbled,
And the ship and all the ocean
Woke up in wild commotion.
Then the wind set up a howling,
And the poodle dog a yowling,
And the cocks began a crowing,
And the old cow raised a lowing,
As she heard the tempest blowing;
And fowls and geese did cackle,
And the cordage and the tackle
Began to shriek and crackle;
And the spray dashed o'er the funnels,
And down the deck in runnels;
And the rushing water soaks all,
From the seamen in the fo'ksal
To the stokers whose black faces
Peer out of their bed-places;
And the captain, he was bawling,
And the sailors pulling, hauling,
And the quarter-deck tarpauling
Was shivered in the squalling;
And the passengers awaken,
Most pitifully shaken;
And the steward jumps up and hastens
For the necessary basins.

Then the Greeks they groaned and quivered,
And they knelt, and moaned, and shivered,
As the plunging waters met them,
And splashed and overset them;
And they call in their emergence
Upon countl