with an animated entry of his actors, who thenceforward
play their parts in a succession of incidents and adventures, that are
all adjusted and fitted in to the framework of time and place that he
has taken so much pains to design for them. In this manner he touches
upon the great events of contemporary history, like the French War, or
illustrates the state of England by bringing in highwaymen and the
press-gang; while a minute description of localities lends an air of
simplicity to the tale of an old man who has (as he says) an
extraordinarily clear remembrance of his boyhood.

The Notes which appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_, June 1864, as an
epilogue to the last lines written by Thackeray, when the story
stopped abruptly, throw curious light on the methods of gathering his
material and preparing his work. Just as he visited the Blenheim
battlefield, when he was engaged upon _Esmond_, so he went down to
Romney Marsh, where Denis Duval was born and bred, surveyed Rye and
Winchelsea as if he were drawing plans of those towns, and collected
local traditions of the coast and the country, of the smugglers, the
Huguenot settlements, and the old war time of 1778-82. The _Annual
Register_ and the _Gentleman's Magazine_ furnished him with suggestive
incidents and circumstantial reports which he expanded with admirable
fertility of imagination; so that by combining what he saw with what
he read he could lift the curtain and light up again an obscure corner
of the Kentish coast, and the doings of the queer folk who lived on it
a century before he went there. That he never finished this novel is
much to be lamented, for Denis had just become a midshipman on board
the _Serapis_, and we learn from these 'Notes' that he was to take
part in the great fight which ended in the capture of that ship by
Paul Jones, after the most bloody and desperate duel in the long and
glorious record of the British Navy. Captain Pearson, who commanded
the _Serapis_, reported his defeat to the Admiralty in a letter of
which 'Mr. Thackeray seems to have thought much,' and, indeed, it is
precisely the sort of document--quiet, formal, with a masculine
contempt for adjectives (there is not one in the whole letter)--which
denotes a character after Thackeray's own heart.

'We dropt alongside of each other, head and stern, when, the fluke
of our spare anchor hooking his quarter, we became so close, fore
and aft, that the muzzles of our guns