eak his word of compassion. If he had but his flute left, he would
give that, and make the children happy in the dreary London courts."

Of this too I will remind my readers,--those who have bookshelves
well-filled to adorn their houses,--that Goldsmith stands in the front
where all the young people see the volumes. There are few among the
young people who do not refresh their sense of humour occasionally from
that shelf, Sterne is relegated to some distant and high corner. The
less often that he is taken down the better. Thackeray makes some half
excuse for him because of the greater freedom of the times. But "the
times" were the same for the two. Both Sterne and Goldsmith wrote in the
reign of George II.; both died in the reign of George III.

CHAPTER VIII.

THACKERAY'S BALLADS.

We have a volume of Thackeray's poems, republished under the name of
_Ballads_, which is, I think, to a great extent a misnomer. They are all
readable, almost all good, full of humour, and with some fine touches of
pathos, most happy in their versification, and, with a few exceptions,
hitting well on the head the nail which he intended to hit. But they are
not on that account ballads. Literally, a ballad is a song, but it has
come to signify a short chronicle in verse, which may be political, or
pathetic, or grotesque,--or it may have all three characteristics or any
two of them; but not on that account is any grotesque poem a
ballad,--nor, of course, any pathetic or any political poem. _Jacob
Omnium's Hoss_ may fairly be called a ballad, containing as it does a
chronicle of a certain well-defined transaction; and the story of _King
Canute_ is a ballad,--one of the best that has been produced in our
language in modern years. But such pieces as those called _The End of
the Play_ and _Vanitas Vanitatum_, which are didactic as well as
pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as
_The Mahogany Tree_, or the little collection called _Love Songs made
Easy_. The majority of the pieces are not ballads, but if they be good
of the kind we should be ungrateful to quarrel much with the name.

How very good most of them are, I did not know till I re-read them for
the purpose of writing this chapter. There is a manifest falling off in
some few,--which has come from that source of literary failure which is
now so common. If a man write a book or a poem because it is in him to
write it,--the motive power being altogether i