velist on his charming little
hero--"Little Billee"? Evidently the name, together with certain
descriptive touches, has been taken from Thackeray's ballad, "Little
Billee." This racy skit, as many doubtless know, is in the best vein of
the great humorist's inimitable burlesque. It narrates the tragic cruise
of

"Three sailors of Bristol city
Who took a boat and went to sea,"

the second stanza running thus:--

"There was gorging Jack, and guzzling Jimmy
_And the youngest, he was Little Billee_.
Now when they got as far as the Equator
They'd nothing left, but one split pea."

And the unpleasant ultimatum being arrived at, that "We've nothing left,
us must eat we," the poem continues:--

"Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy,
With one another we shouldn't agree,
There's little Bill, _he's young and tender_,
We're old and tough, so let's eat he."

Here, I say, we have the origin of the novelist's "Little Billee,"
while, in the italicized phrases, we have also du Maurier's, "the third,
he was little Billee" (page 6), and "he was young and tender, was little
Billee."

It would be sheer nonsense, of course, to urge against the famous
novelist any charge of unacknowledged borrowing in matters so entirely
trivial. The point is merely a curious one of origins; a little
siccatine botanizing, so to speak, on the _folia disjecta_ that have
been wonderfully spun by du Maurier's genius into a fabric of grace and
beauty so rare as is this "Trilby." Nor, indeed, should the further fact
be a detraction from the gifted author of "Trilby," that his
indebtedness to Thackeray is obviously greater than in the minutiae under
consideration--that, in fact, he has caught from the great immortal the
note of much that is best in his book. In his limpid, graceful
simplicity of words, and their easy, natural flow--in his delicate,
playful humor, and tender but not overwrought pathos, we discover a
careful study of found only a few general remarks about fairies, their
habits and habitations, nothing in the least resembling the story of
Jeannie's lover. Perhaps Nodier was mistaken about his source. As he
travelled in the Highlands, he may possibly have "collected" the tale at
first hand, and, there being no folk-lore societies in those early days
of romanticism, he was not aware of the honor that thus accrued to him.
It cannot have evolved itself from a mere hint. We appeal to Mr. Lang to
take