of fortune was not the only cause. When a young man in Paris, he married; and after enjoying domestic happiness for several years, his wife caught a fever from which she never afterwards sufficiently recovered to be able to be with her husband and children. She was henceforth intrusted to the care of a kind family, where every comfort and attention was secured for her. The lines in the ballad of the Bouillabaisse" are supposed to refer to this early time of domestic felicity: 46 Ah me! how quick the days are flitting! I mind me of a time that's gone, When here I'd sit as now I'm sitting, In this place-but not alone. A fair young form was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked fondly up, And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me- In dictating to his amanuensis during the composition of the lectures on the "Four Georges," he would light a cigar, pace the room for a few minutes, and then resume his work with increased cheerfulness, changing his position very frequently, so that he was sometimes sitting, standing, walking, or lying about. His enunciation was always clear and distinct, and his words and thoughts were so well weighed that the progress of writing was but seldom checked. He dictated with calm deliberation, and shewed no risible feeling even when he had made a humorous point. His whole literary career was one of unremitting industry; he wrote slowly, and like 'George Eliot,' gave forth his thoughts in such perfect form, that he rarely required to retouch his work. His handwriting was neat and plain, often very minute; which led to the remark, that if all trades failed, he would earn sixpences by writing the Lord's Prayer and the Creed in the size of one. Unlike many men of less talent, he looked upon caligraphy as one of the fine arts. When at the height of his fame he was satisfied when he wrote six pages a day, generally working during the day, seldom at night. An idea which would only be slightly developed in some of his shorter stories, he treasured up and expanded in some of his larger works. While Alfred Tennyson the future Laureate received the gold medal at Cambridge given by the Chancellor of the university for the best English poem, the subject being "Timbuctoo," we find Thackeray satirising the subject in a humorous paper called "The Snob." Here are a few lines from his clever skit on the prize poem: There stalks the tiger-there the lion roars, And then lies down 'neath trees called cocoa-nuts. The personal appearance of Thackeray has been frequently described. His nose through an early accident, was misshapen; it was broad at the bridge, and stubby a the end. He was near-sighted: and his hair at forty was already gray, but massy and abundant-his keen and kindly eyes twinkled sometimes through and sometimes over his spectacles. A friend remarked that what he should call the predominant expres sion of the countenance was courage-a readiness to face the world on its own terms. Unlike Dickens, he took no regular walking exercise, and being regardless of the laws of health, suffered in consequence. In reply to one who asked him if he had ever received the best medical advice, his reply was: What is the use of advice if you don't follow it? They tell me not to drink, and I do drink. They tell me not to smoke, and I do smoke. They tell me not to eat, and I do eat. In short, I do everything that I am desired not to do-and therefore. what am I to expect?' And so one morning he was found lying. like Dr. Chalmers. in the sleep of death with his arms beneath his head, after one of his violent attacks of illness-to be mourned by his mother and daughters, who formed his household, and by a wider public beyond, which had learned to love him through his admirable works.-Chambers's Journal, THE LIBRARY MAGAZINE. FEBRUARY, 1879. THE FRIENDS AND FOES OF RUSSIA. _T is a common and a profitable trick of party to assume the mask of nationality. It is safely calculated that such an assumption, successfully achieved, will disintegrate the ranks of the opponents; since it is not only a just, but an elementary proposition that the interests of the country are to be preferred to the interests of party. Upon this safe calculation the Tories of to-day, aided by some whom accidents or passions have rallied to their standard, have been working steadily for the last two and a half years. It seems that the game is nearly played out, and the pretext worn too thin to cover effectually what it hides. Sympathy with Russia, with the despotism of Russia, with the bad faith of Russia, with the cruelty of Russia, has been the charge incessantly reiterated against the Liberal party. Not only, it seems, are they enamoured of this Power, but so enamoured of it that they are disposed and eager to sacrifice for its sake the interests of their country, which are, ex necessitate rei, their own interests. This filching and appropriation of the national credit seems to be no better than the crowning trick of a party warfare, not fastidious as to the weapons it employs. Only on rare occasions can it be performed: at junctures, namely, when a foreign country happens to stand in a sympathetic relation to some cause which it is desired to discredit, and at the same time to have, or to be capable of being represented as having, the will and power to inflict injury on England. The second of these conditions can be easily fulfilled: for the real interests of the British Empire are so widely lodged, that, even apart from factitious outgrowths and accretions, they may come within arm's length of every great country in the world. So that one day France, and another day Germany, and another day America, have served the turn of our alarmists. But for the last three years they have speculated upon Russia as supplying them with the best phlogistic to be had, because the questions of the day have thrown the public susceptibilities principally into this direction. The Slavonic, as well as the Christian, sympathies of L. M.-I.-5. the Russian people attached them powerfully to a cause, which the Liberals of England, renouncing all theological and ecclesiastical partialities in the case, were bound to favour as the cause of liberty against despotism, and of the sufferer against the oppressor. It was impossible for the British Liberals and Nonconformists to become the instruments of wounding that sacred cause, the cause of the subject races of the East, through the sides of Russia. But the Tories in general were under no such disability. In the days of the Duke of Wellington, Lord Aberdeen, and Sir R. Peel, they were, for full thirty years, or from about 1820 to 1850, the great peace party of this country. But they have unlearned all such weakness, together with many of the other lessons inculcated by those distinguished men; and now, on the high horse of national pride, they are at once the opponents of reform at home, and the main disturbers of the general peace. Nor does any such tie bind them as that which has bound the Liberal party to the cause of subject races: for who has ever heard, in the recent history of Toryism, of a deed done, or so much as a word spoken, for Freedom, in any one of the numerous battles in which, at so many spots on the surface of the globe, she has been engaged? The Ministry, then, found an opportunity first of throwing the Christian cause into Russian hands; and then, because the hands were Russian, of reviling all, who refused to surrender it to the foul and debasing tyranny of Turkey, as being of necessity the friends of Turkey's enemy. The great Russian bogie was purchased; and exhibited at every fair in the country. The game, played with skill and daring, was successful at least within the walls of Parliament, where something very different from "chill penury" sometimes freezes "the genial current of the soul." The majorities obtained by the Government rose in number; and, though the action of an opposite feeling in the nation has at last reduced them, the process has been slow and far from uniform. And now, when the signs of change are fast gathering in the sky, the last hope of a party beginning to be abashed seems still to lie in fastening on the Liberals the idle and calumnious imputation that they are in some special and guilty sense the friends of Russia. But they forget that the opening, which their good fortune gave them, is now closed, and that the old combination has given place to new. By arms and blood (for the British Government resisted and broke up the European concert which promised a milder method), the special aim of Russian sympathies has been, not wholly but for the most part, attained. The Slavonic provinces of Turkey are now, through the efforts and sacrifices of a single nation, independent, like Servia and Montenegro; or tributary like Bulgaria; or at the very least autonomous, with a more ambiguous freedom like Eastern Roumelia. The work of deliverance has been in the main accomplished. The Liberals of England still owe full justice to these great acts of Russia; but they are no longer liable to be charged as moral partners in the canso; for the cause has now been pleaded, the great Judge has pro nounced His sentence; and lands and races, which England refused to liberate, are free. Let it be said that Russia did good from bad motives. This is not now the question. The Tories and their adherents have yet to acquire the perception of a fact, from which they yet strive to turn away their vision: the fact that the alliance between Russia and the great cause of deliverance is no longer the salient and determining point of the Eastern Question. That alliance has glided into the past; its fruit is gathered; and the position of Russia, in its relation respectively to the Toryism and the Liberalism of England, is no longer subject to any disturbing agency. The Russian bogie is not any more available for the political fair. And the questions can now be freely and exhaustively discussed, who and what is Russia, and which is the party that is best entitled to fling in the teeth of the other the charge of being her peculiar friends? Who and what is Russia? Not the name of a complex and multiform society of intricate configuration, such as is our own: but a vast mass, comparatively inorganic, still nationally young, and simple in its forms of life. We may regard Russia, for the present purpose, as including three elements, three forces only. First the Emperor; secondly the people; thirdly the official, aristocratic and military class; which last may be said to make up there what, both there and here, passes under the name of "society." Of these three factors, distinct estimates have to be formed. The present Emperor of Russia has, during a reign now approaching a quarter of a century, given ample evidence of a just and philanthropic mind. No greater triumph of peaceful legislation is anywhere recorded than the emancipation of the Russian serfs, which he has effected. It is true that he gave to England assurances about Khiva, which he has been unable to fulfil. But the military measures taken against the Khan apparently had in view the real necessities of peace and order in that region, from which plunder and kidnapping had to be expelled. There is little in their accompaniments, either of profit or of power, which would warrant the imputation of an unworthy motive. It is more just to ascribe the Emperor's original promise of entire abstention to an honorable anxiety for the friendship of England, and as an over. sanguine expectation, than to denounce as an act of bad faith a resort to force which has every appearance of reason and of justice. In the great matter of the war with Turkey, I avow my belief that the Emperor was prompted by motives of humanity, which drew additional force from the special sympathies of race and of religion. Justice seems to require a similar admission in regard to the Russian people. They are a peaceful and submissive race, whose courage in the field is that of a determined and uncalculating obedience. Domestic in their habits, rural in their pursuits, and fighting the battle of ordinary life under hard conditions, they are little open to the evil influences of what is here termed Jingoism; the conscription has for them no charms; and war summons them to little else than privation, wounds, disease, and death. Probably few among us are so biassed as to doubt that the Russian people have been moved, during the last three years, by a thrill of genuine emotion on behalf of their enslaved and suffering brethren, rather than by "Russian interests," or appeals to pride, or the lust of territorial aggrandisement. That which reason bids us to conclude as to the people, we must also suppose at least as to individuals in the class which I have described as the third great moving force of the Russian Empire. Of this type was Colonel Kirieff, who met and indeed courted a hero's death in the Servian war of 1876. But the general character and tendencies of the body are another matter. The spirit of aggression has a natural home in the oligarchic, diplomatic, and military class, whose personal and specific leanings it as strongly favours as it counteracts the interests of the people. We have seen too plainly what, though with many honourable exceptions, are the tendencies and leanings of the corresponding classes even among ourselves, where their sentiments are modified, and their action limited, by free public discussion and by popular institutions. It is not difficult to understand what are the propensities, and what the power of the military, official, and aristocratic elements of Russian society; what pretexts they may advance, and what use they may be tempted to make of the huge but inorganic forces of the nation, which lie almost helplessly at their disposal. It is not necessary here to dwell upon shades and subdivisions of opinion, or to distinguish Moscow from St. Petersburg. It would not be just to treat even the incorporated influences we are now considering as a mass of unmixed evil. But this class, in regard to the rights of other countries and the peace of the world, is the dangerous class of Russia; the class that prides itself upon wisdom because it has power; the class that thinks itself cultivated because it has leisure; that includes all those who claim to lead the nation because they have long and often misled it, and to think and act for it, and drag it in the train of their thoughts and acts, because they live upon it. This class, or rather this conglomerate of classes, ever watchful for its aims, ubiquitous yet organised, standing everywhere between the Emperor and the people, and oftentimes too strong for both, is at work day and night to impress its own character upon Russian policy. The Duke of Wellington declined to place confidence in Russia; for, as he said with strong sense and truth, it was not his business to place confidence in foreign Governments. It is our business to judge them fairly, but to watch them closely; and in our present judgments to avail ourselves of all the aid that can be derived from the observation of the past. Thus mixed in the composition of its political forces, and having not yet emerged from her despotic institutions, the Russia of Alexander and of Nicholas was undoubtedly the head of European Toryism, even while Austria was its right hand. She was the greatest and most important member of the Holy Alliance. In the case, however, of the Christian, and especially the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey, the sympa |