became common among inspired nuns. Purity itself was impassioned. By the laws of chivalry, the knight's love for his lady was expressed in courtesy and kindness toward all the world. In the cloister also, devotion to the great lover expressed itself in tenderness for men.

The great monastic expansion of the twelfth century took a long step toward democracy in the cloister. The problem of the unattached woman of the lower class had become a menace to society. The great orders of Fontevraud and Prémontré, as well as many less famous, were organized in the interest of the helpless of all classes, and particularly of the lost woman. Of Fontevraud we are told that 'the poor were received, the feeble were not refused, nor women of evil life, nor sinners, neither lepers nor the helpless.' Thousands of women entered these orders. From a bull of 1344 it is to be inferred that there were at that time about four hundred settlements of Premonstrant nuns. All the women in these settlements were professed, and their lives were spent in constant labor, which ultimately brought worldly as well as moral profit. These orders spread rapidly and widely. They were in harmony with the general tendency of the age, both ideally and practically; for while they gave ease to the rising social conscience of the upper classes, they also helped the growth of skilled labor and trade organization among the lower.

We can best realize the contrast between the old nunnery and the new by noting two specific cases in England. In the middle of the twelfth century Mary of Blois, daughter of King Stephen, was abbess of the ancient foundation of Romsey, associated with many other royal and noble ladies. Upon the death of her brother William she became heiress of the County of Boulogne. Henry II thereupon over

rode her vows, brought her from the cloister, and married her to Matthew, son of the Count of Flanders, who thus became Count of Boulogne. Mary's sister Matilda had a somewhat similar experience, and her convent breeding left her with a taste for letters and the ability to correspond in Latin with learned men. At the very time that these great ladies were exemplifying in Wessex the solidarity of interest between court and cloister, Gilbert of Sempringham was creating from humble beginnings his great settlements for the higher life, and his dwellings for the poor and the infirm, for lepers and for orphans. Gilbert was the son of a Norman baron by an English woman of low degree. He was educated in France and studied the great orders of the continent, with the result that when his growing foundation came to need a rule, he gave it one of wide eclecticism to meet the needs of canons and nuns, lay-brothers and lay-sisters. The simple life was to be lived at Sempringham, and to this art and letters seemed to be inimical. The rule declared pictures and sculpture superfluous, and forbade the use of the Latin tongue unless under special circumstances. A prior ruled the men, three prioresses the women, who were twice as numerous. The women performed the domestic work for the whole body, handing the men's meals through a hole in the wall with a turn-table.

But the humanitarianism that inspired Gilbert reached Matilda too, in spite of her classical education. A famous anecdote describes her girt with a towel and washing the feet of lepers. Her hospital of St. Giles in the East was for long the most important institution of its kind in England. 'Leprosy' was in the middle ages a summary term for many forms of disfiguring skin-disease. Fear of contagion was a comparatively recent motive for its isolation, which

originated in its loathsomeness to the eye. The care of the leper became a typical good work. His miserable lot as an outcast formed a special appeal to the new tenderness of heart, while his repulsiveness made his tendance an instrument for the new effort to be like Christ. Great ladies everywhere, generally convent-bred, renounced place and pleasure to serve the sick and the poor. Virchow remarks that the great family of the Counts of Andechs and Meran, famous for its philanthropy, practically extinguished itself by devotion. Its men joined the crusades or the church, its women entered the cloister, and after a few generations this powerful and widespread family perished of its virtues.

The mendicant orders, which realized what Plato had maintained, that he who is to serve society must have nothing of his own, held up an ideal absolutely at variance with the vested interests which the abbess had so ably administered. Side by side with the feudal strongholds of the church, the Poor Clares built their huts, bearing toward them somewhat the relation that the Salvation Army bears to a charitable millionaire. The Poor Clares had no time for culture and the arts. Love for God and man and the passion for service carried into the vow of poverty thousands of women from every class. Asceticism and silence were opposed as methods to comfort and scholarship. The ultimate deterioration of the mendicants did not come until they had induced the general change of ideas that was to be responsible for the Protestant Reformation.

The decay of the aristocratic monastery was doubtless a step in advance in the history of men, but it was a calamity for the lady, who was reduced to the old dilemma of the home or outlawry. Luther had a thoroughly Mohammedan notion of woman's status,—only as a wife and mother had she a right to exist. Her education became a matter of no importance, and virtually ceased. Even Fuller, the worthy seventeenthcentury divine, who cannot be accused of a bias in favor of convents, said: "They were good she schools wherein the girls and maids of the neighborhood were taught to read and work; and sometimes a little Latin was taught them therein. Yea, give me leave to say, if such feminine foundations had still continued, provided no vow were obtruded upon them, (virginity is least kept where it is most constrained,) haply the weaker sex, besides the avoiding modern inconveniences, might be heightened to a higher perfection than hitherto hath been attained.'

Without accepting Fuller's epigram, we may admit that the ideal of virginity was not always attained in the cloister; neither is justice always attained on the bench, nor valor in the army. Many a prioress besides Chaucer's may have had for her motto, 'Amor vincit omnia.' But the very persistence of the system would be strong evidence, if we had no other, that on the whole the cloister had the esteem of its contemporaries, and that the women who gave it tone were in general true to their calling, and made wholeheartedly the sacrifice in return for which they received freedom.

FOR a man who has so signally 'retained after death the art of making friends,' Thackeray was viewed in his own day through a queer variety of spectacles. His character, upbringing, associates, opinions, and way of life, were all severely called in question. He was, I think, the most scolded of literary men; and especially was he scolded for the want (or concealment) of that heart which to us he seems to wear so conspicuously pinned to his sleeve. Looking now at that indulgent, uncle-like, and open-hearted countenance, with the benign spectacles and broken nose (resembling a child's), it is hard for us to understand the shuddering admiration, 'unmixed with love,' of those who read Vanity Fair in numbers, and who agreed with the London Times about the misanthropic character of The Kickleburys on the Rhine.'

FitzGerald might regard him with affection, even familiarity; but Carlyle and Charlotte Brontë thought him rather fierce and wild, with a good deal of the lion in his composition, and perhaps a little of the wolf. E. P. Whipple declared that he looked at life 'with a skeptical eye, sharpened by a wearied heart.' No wonder, then, if he found himself 'honestly forced to inculcate the dreadful doctrine that life does not pay.' 'His bearing was cold and uninviting, his style of conversation either openly cynical or affectedly good-natured... his bonhomie was forced, his wit biting.' This unflattering picture was drawn, to be sure, by the malicious pen of Edmund Yates; but it

is supported in part by the reluctant descriptions of admirers of his genius. Most preposterous of all, he was said to 'spend a good deal of his time on stilts,' and to prove 'a disagreeable companion to those who did not care to boast that they knew him.'

These curious comments on the behavior of a particularly unaffected gentleman can best be explained, perhaps, by the hypothesis that Thackeray was occasionally the prey of a perverse humor, and indulged at times that Comic Spirit which was not then the presiding genius of drawing-rooms. Perhaps he sometimes replied to some unimpeachable sentiment in the grotesque vein his drawings so richly illustrate. At any rate, he was thoroughly lectured by all hands. 'His sentiment,' says the Westminster Review reproachfully, 'was seldom indulged.' His pathos 'leaves the eye unmoistened.' His was 'a cheerless creed, and false as cheerless.' No woman, continues this censor, would care to read Titmarsh and Yellowplush. It is true, 'the salutary influence of Dickens' has relieved the savage sharpness of his pen in later works; but still, 'from false taste, or a deeper infirmity, he gives prominence to blots, defects,' etc., and (worst of all) sees a comic aspect in wickedness.'

Ladies in particular averted their ringlets and drew aside their crinolines from contact with the cannibal. The Westminster reviewer was right: their ticklish sensibilities could ill endure

That hideous sight, a naked human heart.

So great a moral disgust' did Harriet Martineau feel as she perused the early numbers of Vanity Fair, that she soon banished it from her shelves, and never (let us hope!) enjoyed the immortal description of Amelia folding the red sash before the battle of Waterloo. She sternly rebuked Thackeray for his frittered life, and his obedience to the call of the great.' He never could have known, she asserted, a good or sensible woman. Miss Mitford found him 'all cynicism, with an affectation of fashionable experience.' 'I have no affinities,' majestically declared Catherine Sedgwick, 'with this sagacity no great admiration for this detective. . . detecting poison.' Mrs. Jameson undertook to speak for her whole sex. 'Every woman resents," said she, the selfish inanity of Amelia. And then Lady Castlewood! Oh, Mr. Thackeray, this will never do!' Even the great Charlotte, with her freedom from drawing-room judgments, felt a grievance against Lady Castlewood, and indignantly resented the episode of the keyhole. 'As usual,' said she, 'he is unjust to women, quite unjust.' She, who had called him an eagle, a captain of reformers and regenerators of society; who had likened his sarcasm to Greek fire, and his denunciation to 'the levin branch,' found that in him, as well, which 'stirred her both to sorrow and to anger his mocking tongue.'

Mrs. Ritchie, in one of her biographical introductions to her father's works, describes a little tour through Devonshire, on which she accompanied him in 1856. At Exeter they called upon one Madam Fribsby, 'a delightful old creature,' who entertained the warmest personal regard for Thackeray, but wasted no thought upon his pretensions as a novelist. All her enthusiasm was already bespoken. She reproached him with not having formed his style

upon a different model, upon that of the greatest writer in the English language' - in short, upon Richardson's. 'Where, where can you show me books,' demanded Madam Fribsby, 'that compare with Sir Charles Grandison?'

Graver critics than the Exeter lady drew invidious comparisons between the heroines of Thackeray and those of Richardson. In the summer of 1859 Fraser's Magazine contained a serious estimate of English literature to date; in which, after beholding Scott bracketed with G. P. R. James, and both gently escorted along the road to probable oblivion, we are told that neither Dickens nor Thackeray really wrote novels! Their works were 'pseudo-novels,' or 'serial stories,' - 'not constructed on the principles of that art, wholly unknown to the ancients, which may be called the narrative-dramatic. . . . Mr. Thackeray's chief implement is the exposure of the littlenesses, meannesses, and vulgarities of his fellow-creatures.' These 'he renders with a fortyPre-Raphaelite power, and anatomizes with a merciless delight. . . . To do this thoroughly, as Mr. Thackeray does it, is given to few'; but the reviewer thinks it rather a revolting task; and 'there is a good deal less love than admiration in our feeling toward the man who does it well.'

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The fact is that this reviewer's enthusiasm, like that of Madam Fribsby, is 'all bespoken.' He too is infatuated with the Byrons and Grandisons. There is not, in his opinion, ‘a tale in any language worthy to be put on the same shelf with Clarissa Harlowe.' 'The consummate art with which the characters are grouped, and the simple and masterly grandeur of their separate treatment' mark the work of 'an unrivalled genius.' As for Clarissa herself, 'perhaps even Shakespeare never drew a heroine more exquisite. A modesty so majestic . a girlish vivacity and

playfulness so indomitable . . . a smile so heavenly,' etc. 'Where,' he well asks, ‘where, on paper, shall we look upon her like again?'

What wonder that Amelia and Rebecca, making their bows to a public signed and sealed with the image of Clarissa, should fare ill at the hands of astonished reviewers? Nobody wanted a heroine to be lifelike; what was required was an 'exquisite' creature. Vanity Fair appeared in 1846-48. E. P. Whipple at once pronounced it, though touching on 'topics worn threadbare' and full of 'commonplace characters,' still, 'on the whole' a clever and interesting book. But few critics were content thus to damn it with faint praise. Explosions of angry dissent greeted the portraits of Captain Dobbin and Amelia. We had been to the photographer's, and were not at all pleased with the proofs. Captain Dobbin was 'so ungainly as to be almost objectionable' to the Westminster Review, and Amelia was so weak that she quite 'wore out its patience.' The Edinburgh Review declined 'to worship such a poor idol of female excellence.' A deeper note of wrath was sounded in a great religious periodical. 'Woe to him who parts from his faith in mankind, and leaves us to conclude that nothing is real but folly and perfidy!'

The hisses which greeted Amelia and the captain on their first appearance had scarcely died away when they were echoed again by Taine, a quarter of a century later; and so late as 1895 Mr. Saintsbury declaimed, in true earlyVictorian style, against the 'nambypambyness' of the one, and the 'chuckle-headed goodness' of the other. To be sure, the North British Review took up the cudgels for Thackeray, pertinently inquiring 'why we call ourselves miserable sinners on Sunday, if we are to abuse Mr. Thackeray on weekdays for making us out something

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less than saints?' American critics, too, were generally more discerning. Lowell compared each of Thackeray's novels to 'a Dionysius ear, through which we hear the world talking.' Emerson with a sigh remarked, 'We must renounce ideals and accept London.' It was Mr. Stoddard who paid the finest compliment. 'Thackeray could not have written Vanity Fair,' 'unless Eden had been shining brightly before his eyes.'

The sentiment, 'somewhat slack and low-pitched,' and 'shallower than that of Dickens,' which had seemed to impatient readers so parsimoniously doled out in Vanity Fair, was a little more forthcoming, all agreed, in The Newcomes and Pendennis. Tennyson told FitzGerald that he liked the latter much; it was 'so mature.' E. P. Whipple, on the contrary, was 'depressed' by it; besides, it 'wanted unity and purpose.' Laura Pendennis was 'dull'; there was indeed 'a feeble amiability about all his best characters.' The Chronicle accused Pendennis of fostering a baneful prejudice against literary men. The author was said to be playing to popularity in. thus belittling and ridiculing his confrères. Again the North British Review ventured to defend him. But Thackeray conducted his own defense very ably by saying that he only meant to inculcate the maxim that literary men should love their families and pay their tradesmen. 'I have seen,' he added, 'the bookseller whom Bludye robbed of his books.'

Surely the pleasantost comment ever passed on Pendennis was the anecdote told Thackeray by Dr. Kane: that in the Arctic seas he found a seaman crouched in the hold reading for hours; 'and behold, the book was Pendennis.' There is indeed something beguiling and engaging about Pen far above his cousin Clive. I once knew two young Southern ladies who habitually referred to 'Pen' as to a relation or old