cles, is not very happy even when most domestic. Ivanhoe becomes sad and moody. He takes to drinking, and his lady does not forget to tell him of it. "Ah, dear axe!" he exclaims, apostrophising his weapon, "ah. gentle steel! that was a merry time when I sent thee crashing into the pate of the Emir Abdul Melek !" There was nothing left to him but his memories; and “in a word, his life was intolerable." So he determines that he will go and look after King Richard, who of course was wandering abroad. He anticipates a little difficulty with his wife; but she is only too happy to let him go, comforting herself with the idea that Athelstane will look after her. So her husband starts on his journey. "Then Ivanhoe s trumpet blew. Then Rowena waved her pocket-handkerchief. Then the hausehold gave a shout. Then the pursuivant of the good knight, Sir Wilfrid the Crusader, flung out his banner-which was argent, a gules cramoisy with three Moors impaled-then Wamba gave a lash on his mule's haunch, and Ivanhoe, heaving a great sigh, turned the tail of his war-horse upon the castle of his fathers."

Ivanhoe finds Cœur de Lion besieging the Castle of Chalons, and there they both do wondrous deeds, Ivanhoe always surpassing the king. The jealousy of the courtiers, the ingratitude of the king, and the melancholy of the knight, who is never comforted except when he has slaughtered some hundreds, are delightful. Roger de Back bite and Peter de Toadhole are intended to be quite real. Then his majesty sings, passing off as his own a song of Charles Lever's. Sir Wilfrid declares the truth, and twits the king with his falsehood, whereupon he has the guitar thrown at his head for his pains. He catches the guitar, however, gracefully in his left hand, and sings his own immortal ballad of King Canute-than which Thackeray never did anything better.

"Might I stay the sun above us, good Sir Bishop?" Canute cried; "Could I bid the silver moon to pause upon her heavenly ride?

If the moon obeys my orders, sure I can command the tide.

"Will the advancing waves obey me, Bishop, if I make the sign ?”

Said the bishop, bowing lowly:"Land and sea, my lord, are thine."

Canute turned towards the ocean: "Back," he said, "thou foaming brine."

But the sullen ocean answered with a louder, deeper roar,
And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling, sounding on the shore;
Back the keeper and the bishop, back the king and courtiers bore.

We must go to the book to look at the picture of the king as he is killing the youngest of the sons of the Count of Chalons. Those illustrations of Doyle's are admirable. The size of the king's head, and the size of his battle-axe, as contrasted with the size of the child, are burlesque all over. But the king has been wounded by a bolt from the bow of Sir Bertrand de Gourdon, while he is slaughtering

the infant, and there is an end of him. Ivanhoe, too, is killed at the siege-Sir Roger de Backbite having stabbed him in the back during the scene. Had he not been then killed, his widow Rowena could not have married Athelstane, which she soon did after hearing the sad news; nor could he have had that celebrated epitaph in Latin and English:

Hic est Guilfridus, belli dum vixit avidus.

Cum gladeo et lancea Normannia et quoque Francia
Verbera dura dabat. Per Turcos multum equitabat.
Guilbertum occidit ;-atque Hyerosolyma vidit.
Heu nunc sub fossa sunt tanti militis ossa.
Uxor Athelstani est conjux castissima Thani.*

The translation, we are told, was by Wamba :

The next chapter begins naturally as follows: "I trust nobody will suppose, from the events described in the last chapter, that our friend Ivanhoe is really dead." He is of course cured of his wounds, though they take six years in the curing. And then he makes his way back to Rotherwood, in a friar's disguise, much as he did on that former occasion when we first met him, and there is received by Athelstane and Rowena-and their boy!-while Wamba sings him a song:

Then you know the worth of a lass,
Once you have come to forty year i

No one, of course, but Wamba knows Ivanhoe, who roams about the country, melancholy-as he of course would be-charitable-as he perhaps might be for we are specially told that he had a large

I doubt that Thackeray did not write the Latin epitaph, but I hardly dare sug gest the name of any author. The "vixit avidus" is quite worthy of Thackeray; but had he tried his hand at such mode of expression he would have done more of it. I should like to know whether he had been in company with Father Prout at the time.

fortune and nothing to do with it, and slaying robbers wherever he met them-but sad at heart all the time. Then there comes a little burst of the author's own feelings, while he is burlesquing. "Ah, my dear friends and British public, are there not others who are melancholy under a mask of gaiety, and who in the midst of crowds are lonely? Liston was a most melancholy man ; Grimaldi had feelings; and then others I wot of. But psha!-let us have the next chapter." In all of which there was a touch of earnestness.

. Ivanhoe's griefs were enhanced by the wickedness of King John, under whom he would not serve. "It was Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, I need scarcely say, who got the Barons of England to league together and extort from the king that famous instrument and palladium of our liberties, at present in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury-The Magna Charta." Athelstane also quarrels with the king, whose orders he disobeys, and Rotherwood is attacked by the royal army. No one was of real service in the way of fighting except Ivanhoe-and how could he take up that cause? "No; he hanged to me," said the knight, bitterly. "This is a quarrel in which I can't interfere. Common politeness forbids. Let yonder ale-swilling Athelstane defend his-ha, ha!-wife; and my Lady Rowena guard her-ha, ha !—son!" and he laughed wildly and madly.

"An

But Athelstane is killed-this time in earnest and then Ivanhoe rushes to the rescue. He finds Gurth dead at the park-lodge; and though he is all alone-having outridden his followers-he rushes up the chestnut avenue to the house, which is being attacked. Ivanhoe! an Ivanhoe !" he bellowed out with a shout that overcame all the din of battle ;-"Notre Dame à la recousse !" and to hurl his lance through the midriff of Reginald de Bracy, who was commanding the assault-who fell howling with anguish-to wave his battleaxe over his own head, and to cut off those of thirteen men-at-arms, was the work of an instant. "An Ivanhoe! an Ivanhoe !" he still shouted, and down went a man as sure as he said "hoe !"

Nevertheless he is again killed by multitudes, or very nearly-and has again to be cured by the tender nursing of Wamba. But Athelstane is really dead, and Rowena and the boy have to be found. He does his duty and finds them-just in time to be present at Rowena's death. She has been put in prison by King John, and is in extremis when her first husband gets to her. Wilfrid, my early loved," slowly gasped she, removing her gray hair from her furrowed temples, and gazing on her boy fondly as he nestled on Ivanhoe's knee— promise me by St. Waitheof of Templestowe-promise me

"

boon !"

one

* There is something almost illnatured in his treatment of Rowena, who is very false in her declarations of love :-and it is to be feared that by Rowena the author intends the normal married lady of English society.

"I do," said Ivanhoe, clasping the boy, and thinking that it was to that little innocent that the promise was intended to apply.

"By St. Waltheof?'

"By St. Waltheof !"

"Promise me, then," gasped Rowena, staring wildly at him, "that you will never marry a Jewess !"

"By St. Waltheof!" cried Ivanhoe, "but this is too much," and he did not make the promise.

66

Having placed young Cedric at school at the Hall of Dotheboys, in Yorkshire, and arranged his family affairs, Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe quitted a country which had no longer any charm for him, as there was no fighting to be done, and in which his stay was rendered less agreeable by the notion that King John would hang him." So he goes forth and fights again, in league with the Knights of St. Johnthe Templars naturally having a dislike to him because of Brian de Bois Guilbert. "The only fault that the great and gallant, though severe and ascetic Folko of Heydenbraten, the chief of the Order of St. John, found with the melancholy warrior whose lance did such service to the cause, was that he did not persecute the Jews as so religious a knight should. So the Jews, in cursing the Christians, always excepted the name of the Desdichado-or the double disinherited, as he now was-the Desdichado Doblado. Then came the battle of Alarcos, and the Moors were all but in possession of the whole of Spain. Sir Wilfrid, like other good Christians, cannot endure this, so he takes ship in Bohemia, where he happens to be quartered, and has himself carried to Barcelona, and proceeds "to slaughter the Moors forthwith." Then there is a scene in which Isaac of York comes on as a messenger, to ransom from a Spanish knight, Don Beltram de Cuchilla y Trabuco, y Espada, y Espelon, a little Moorish girl. The Spanish knight of course murders the little girl instead of taking the ransom. Two hundred thousand dirhems are offered, however much that may be; but the knight, who happens to be in funds at the time, prefers to kill the little girl. All this is only necessary to the story as introducing Isaac of York. Sir Wilfrid is of course intent upon finding Rebecca. Through all his troubles and triumphs, from his gaining and his losing of Rowena, from the day on which he had been " locked up with the Jewess in the tower," he had always been true to her. "Away from me!" said the old Jew, tottering. Away, Rebecca is-dead!" Then Ivanhoe goes out and kills fifty thousand Moors, and there is the picture of him-killing them.

But Robecca is not dead at all. Her father had said so because Rebecca had behaved very badly to him. She had refused to marry the Moorish prince, or any of her own people, the Jews, and had gone as far as to declare her passion for Ivanhoe and her resolution to be a Christian. All the Jews and Jewesses in Valencia turned against her so that she was locked up in the back-kitchen and almost

starved to death. But Ivanhoe found her, of course, and makes her Mrs. Ivanhoe, or Lady Wilfrid the second. Then Thackeray tells us how for many years he, Thackeray, had not ceased to feel that it ought to be so. "Indeed I have thought of it any time these fiveand-twenty years-ever since, as a boy at school, I commenced the noble study of novels-ever since the day when, lying on sunny slopes, of half-holidays, the fair chivalrous figures and beautiful shapes of knights and ladies were visible to me, ever since I grew to love Rebecca, that sweetest creature of the poet's fancy, and longed to see her righted."

And so, no doubt, it had been. The very burlesque had grown from the way in which his young imagination had been moved by Scott's romance. He had felt, from the time of those happy halfholidays in which he had been lucky enough to get hold of the novel, that according to all laws of poetic justice, Rebecca, as being the more beautiful and the more interesting of the heroines, was entitled to the possession of the hero. We have all of us felt the same. But to him had been present at the same time all that is ludicrous in our ideas of middle-age chivalry; the absurdity of its recorded deeds, the bloodthirstiness of its recreations, the selfishness of its men, the falseness of its honour, the cringing of its loyalty, the tyranny of its princes. And so there came forth Rebecca and Rowena, all broad fun from beginning to end, but never without a purpose-the best burlesque, as I think, in our language.

CHAPTER VII.

THACKERAY'S LECTURES.

IN speaking of Thackeray's life. I have said why and how it was that he took upon himself to lecture, and have also told the reader that he was altogether successful in carrying out the views proposed to himself. Of his peculiar manner of lecturing I have said but little, never having heard him. "He pounded along-very clearly," I have been told; from which I surmise that there was no special grace of eloquence, but that he was always audible. I cannot imagine that he should have been ever eloquent. He could not have taken the trouble necessary with his voice, with his cadences, or with his outward appearance. I imagine that they who seem so naturally to fall into the proprieties of elocution have generally taken a great deal of trouble beyond that which the mere finding of their words has cost them. It is clearly to the matter of what he then gave the world, and not to the manner, that we must look for what interest is to be found in the lectures.