sibly an importation from France, into the
English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer
and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for
inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and
strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless
hardihood; and every one must be glad that his 'poor friend Colonel
Altamont,' who had been doomed to execution, was respited at the last
moment, as Thackeray tells us in his preface, on the very technical
plea that the author had not sufficient experience of gaol-birds and
the gallows. Merciful good nature toward a daring scamp, who was free
with his money and kind to women, was probably at the bottom of the
condonation. We know from a paper, reproduced (to our thinking
unnecessarily) in one of these volumes, that in 1840 Thackeray went to
see Courvoisier hanged, and was so much upset by the spectacle that he
prayed for the abolition of capital punishment to wipe out its stain
of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his
stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down
into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests
that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and
does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs
and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth
and decay,' so that each man is born with the natural seed of fortune
or failure. The voyage of life

'has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people
huzzaing and the guns saluting, and the lucky captain bows from the
ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast that
nobody knows of; or you are wrecked and lashed, hopeless, to a
solitary spar out at sea; the sinking man and the successful one
are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time
when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out
of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.'

In such fine passages as these we hear the elegiac strain of the
antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human
efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with
humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops
his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation,
after the manner of Fielding, whose leisurely ton