you have to
pay just like any other showman who comes.' It does not seem to have
occurred to Thackeray that the turning of a gambling-house into a
place of prayer is no bad thing of itself, or that you have no more
right to expect your religious services to be done for you in a
foreign land without payment than your newspapers or novels.

But these are blemishes or eccentricities which are only worth notice
in a character of exceptional interest and a writer of great
originality. Thackeray's work had a distinct influence on the light
literature of his generation, and possibly also on its manners, for it
is quite conceivable that one reason why his descriptions of snobbery
and shams appear to us now overdrawn, may be that his trenchant blows
at social idols did materially discredit the worship of them. His
literary style had the usual following of imitators who caught his
superficial form and missed the substance, as, for example, in the
habit which arose of talking with warm-hearted familiarity of great
eighteenth-century men, and parodying their conversation. It was easy
enough to speak of Johnson as 'Grand Old Samuel,' and to hob-nob with
Swift or Sterne, seeing that, like the lion's part in _Pyramus and
Thisbe_, 'you can do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.'

Thackeray will always stand in the front rank of the very remarkable
array of novelists who have illustrated the Victorian era; and this
new edition is a fresh proof that his reputation is undiminished, and
will long endure.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] _The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with Biographical
Introductions by his daughter_, Anne Ritchie. In 13 volumes. London,
1898.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1898.

[11] Now Lady Ritchie.

THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST[12]

For the last one hundred and fifty years India has been to Englishmen
an ever-widening field of incessant activity, military, commercial,
and administrative. They have been occupied, during a temporary
sojourn in that country, in acquiring and developing a great dominion.
No situation more unfavourable to the development of imaginative
literature could be found than that of a few thousand Europeans
isolated, far from home, among millions of Asiatics entirely different
from them in race, manners, and language. Their hands have been always
full of business, they have been absorbed in the affairs of war and
government, they have been cut off from the culture which is essential