arching with his
hat off intrepidly in the face of the enemy, who was pouring in a
tremendous fire from his guns and musketry, to which our people
were instructed not to reply except with pike and bayonet when they
reached the French palisades. To these Wilkes walked intrepidly,
and struck the woodwork with his sword before our people charged
it. He was shot down on the instant, with his colonel, major, and
several officers,'

and the assault was repelled with great slaughter.

In this and other similar passages, you have the historic novelist at
his best; the true facts are selected and arranged so as to form
pictures of soul-stirring action; while their connection with his
story is maintained by giving Esmond himself a very modest and natural
share in the glorious victory:

'And now the conquerors were met by a furious charge of the English
horse under Esmond's general, Lumley, behind whose squadrons the
flying foot took refuge and formed again, while Lumley drove back
the French horse, charging up to the village of Blenheim and the
palisades where Wilkes, and many hundred more gallant Englishmen,
lay in slaughtered heaps. Beyond this moment, and of this famous
victory, Mr. Esmond knows nothing, for a shot brought down his
horse and our young gentleman on it, who fell crushed and stunned
under the animal.'

A lesser artist would have made his hero perform some brilliant
exploit; but Thackeray prefers to sketch the scene as Wouvermans might
have done it. We have not here the incomparable fire and spirit which
Scott throws into the skirmishes at Bothwell Brig and Drumclog; we see
the difference of mind and method; but we can have nothing except
admiration for the rare imaginative faculty which enabled a quiet man
of letters to deal so finely and faithfully, with such reserve and
discrimination, with a subject that might easily have been spoiled by
the noisy clatter and coarse colouring of the inferior artist. His
full length portrait of Marlborough has been too often quoted to be
reproduced here--'impassible before victory, before danger, before
defeat; the splendid calm of his face as he rode along the lines to
battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling
before the enemy's charge or shot.' Of Swift, Esmond says--'I have
always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of
that age ... a lonely falle