that he believed he had done his duty, and therefore he continued to regard himself, and to be regarded by many others, as a deeplyinjured man.

In previous pages, while speaking of the characteristics of the contemporaries of Mr. Gladstone, we have had to record the losses the country had sustained by the death of a number of the leaders of social and political progress at about the period which we are now considering. To the names of these "men of light and leading" others should be added, though it be only in a passing reference. The sudden death of William Makepeace Thackeray on the 24th of December, 1863 (Christmas Eve), and the shadow which that event cast upon many a household where his writings were admired, was yet remembered, nor had many of those who knew him and his works ceased to believe that the vacant space then left in the world of letters would not be filled by any living writer. It can perhaps scarcely be said that Thackeray was a popular author in the generally accepted sense, for his most appreciative readers were rather among people with a certain peculiar turn of humour and a taste for satire not always ungentle, but in a sense unsparing, inasmuch as it included everybody who had a weak or a wicked side, and, being silent only before innocence and goodness, made comparatively few exceptions.

The "Diary of Jeames Yellowplush," and the Snob Papers in Punch, and numbers of essays, stories, and poems, beside the novels which have taken a high place in the literature of our age, came from his pen. A large number of his readers, and even some of his acquaintances, regarded Thackeray as somewhat of a cynic; and not only was their suspicion supported by the keenness with which he seemed to enjoy lashing the foibles and the small follies and conceits of the time, but there now and then appeared in his conversation and manner a kind of satire that was near to the bitterness of sarcasm. How much of this was to be attributed to his having, in the first part of his career, missed making a reputation as an artist, and failed to obtain the immediate recognition of publishers as an author, cannot

be determined. His reputation, when it did come, was ample and well-deserved. At the time of his death almost anybody, had he been asked the names of the chief writers of fiction in England, would have begun with Dickens, Thackeray, and Bulwer-Lytton.

This is no place to discuss the merits of either, or to compare the writings of one with those of another, for there are few points in either which admit of comparison. It is doubtful if there was much friendship be tween Bulwer and Thackeray, who had satirized and burlesqued him: but Dickens was the friend of both.

In the Cornhill Magazine, of which Thackeray had been the first editor, Dickens wrote (by request) an obituary notice, which was very gentle and characteristic, in which he said:

"I saw him first nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last shortly before Christmas, at the Athenæum Club, when he told me that he had been in bed three days-that after these attacks he was troubled with cold shiverings, which quite took the power of work out of him- and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy which he laughingly described. He was very cheerful, and looked very bright. In the night of that day week he died.

The long interval between those two periods is marked in my remembrance of him by many occasions when he was supremely humorous, when he was irresistibly extravagant, when he was softened and serious, when he was charming with children. But by none do I recall him more tenderly than by two or three that start out of the crowd, when he unexpectedly presented himself in my room, announcing how that some passage in a certain book had made him cry yesterday, and how that he had come to dinner, because he couldn't help it,' and must talk such passage over. No one can ever have seen him more genial, natural, cordial, fresh, and honestly impulsive than I have seen him at those times. No one can be surer than I of the greatness and the goodness of the heart that then disclosed itself.

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We had our differences of opinion. I thought that he too much feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of undervaluing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in trust. But when we fell upon these topics it was never very gravely, and I have a lively image of him in my mind, twisting both his hands in his hair, and stamping about, laughing, to make an end of the discussion.

When we were associated in remembrance of the late Mr. Douglas Jerrold, he delivered a public lecture in London, in the course of which he read his very best contribution to Punch, describing the grown-up cares of a poor family of young children. No one hearing him could have doubted his natural gentleness or his thoroughly unaffected manly sympathy with the weak and lowly. He read the paper most pathetically, and with a simplicity of tenderness that certainly moved one of his audience to tears. This was presently after his standing for Oxford, from which place he had dispatched his agent to me, with a droll note (to which he afterwards added a verbal postscript), urging me to 'come down and make a speech, and tell them who he was, for he doubted whether more than two of the electors had ever heard of him, and he thought there might be as many as six or eight who had heard of me.' He introduced the lecture just mentioned, with a reference to his late electioneering failure, which was full of good sense, good spirits, and good-humour.

The last line he wrote, and the last proof he corrected, are among these papers through which I have so sorrowfully made my way. The condition of the little pages of manuscript where Death stopped his hand, shows that he had carried them about, and often taken them out of his pocket here and there, for patient revision and interlineation. The last words he corrected in print were, 'And my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss.' God grant that on that Christmas Eve, when he laid his head back on his pillow, and threw up his arms as he had been wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done and Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his own heart so to

throb, when he passed away to his Redeemer's rest!

He was found peacefully lying as above described, composed, undisturbed, and to all appearance asleep, on the 24th of December, 1863. He was only in his fifty-third year; so young a man, that the mother who blessed him in his first sleep blessed him in his last. Twenty years before, he had written, after being in a white squall:

And when, its force expended,
The harmless storm was ended,
And, as the sunrise splendid

Came blushing o'er the sea:
I thought, as day was breaking,
My little girls were waking,
And smiling, and making

A prayer at home for me.

Those little girls had grown to be women when the mournful day broke that saw their father lying dead. In those twenty years of companionship with him they had learned much from him; and one of them has a literary course before her worthy of her famous name.

On the bright wintry day, the last but one of the old year, he was laid in his grave at Kensal Green, there to mingle the dust to which the mortal part of him had returned, with that of a third child, lost in her infancy, years ago. The heads of a great concourse of his fellow-workers in the arts were bowed around his tomb."

In the following year (on the 29th October, 1864) another name was added to the roll of those who had departed-a name, too, as popularly known as that of the authors whose pages he had so often illustrated. John Leech, the famous artist whose humorous drawings were justly regarded as pictorial representations of the manners and customs of the time, died almost before reaching middle age. He was a school-fellow of Thackeray at the Charter-house, and each must have keenly appreciated the peculiar humour of the other. To look through the volumes of Punch is to see some of the best of Leech's genial satire and truthful pictures of English life. He was a man of refined taste, and though apparently robust and fond of horse exercise, suffered from a nervous disorder, increased, if not

caused, by the noise of the street organs which were perpetually being played in or near Brunswick Square, where he resided. He removed to Kensington, and had not long taken possession of his new abode when he found himself constantly irritated by the unceasing tap tap of the hammer used by a neighbouring mechanic. His condition became so serious that he was advised to seek change and rest abroad, and was forbidden to take the exercise on horseback to which he had been accustomed. He remained on the Continent for some time; but, having returned to England, the disorder from which he had suffered increased. irritability was perhaps only a symptom of a deeply-seated disease of which he died; but the same effect, though in a less painful degree, has been produced on other distinguished professional men who were unable to escape from the harassing noises by which the dwellers in some London neighbourhoods are perpetually disturbed.

His

Another loss to the higher literature of the country was occasioned by the death of William Edmondstoune Aytoun at his shooting-lodge at Blackhills, near Elgin, in August, 1865. The University of Edinburgh, where he was professor, had reason to mourn, for he was only in the prime of life. The son of an Edinburgh lawyer belonging to the old school of Whigs, Aytoun had begun his literary career in Tait's Magazine, which was then the organ of advanced politics; but his views changed, and in 1839 he became associated with Blackwood's Magazine, and was still more closely allied to the Conservative circle in the Scottish literary world by his marriage with the daughter of John Wilson (Christopher North), the editor of Blackwood. His numerous contributions to "Old Ebony," as well as his poems, ballads, and humorous sketches, kept his name constantly before the reading public, while his academical distinctions gave him a high position at the university, where he was professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres. Aytoun may be said to have been one of the last of a distinguished band of Scottish litterateurs of a period when they formed, as it were, a select and somewhat exclusive company. Some had died, others had been attracted to a wider field of

action. He had remained, as it were, linking the new with the older school, though he was himself not old.

But if Aytoun and his companions could so unite, as it were, two generations of Scottish litterateurs, poets, and philosophers, to what a vast range would the recollections of Brougham extend! Brougham still lived, and survived Aytoun nearly three years. He lived to see another reform bill, but he took no part in it. That vast energy had not sunk into apathy; the widely-reaching intellect was still there; but he was eighty-nine years of age, nearly ninety, when, on the 7th of May, 1868, he was found dead in bed, after having taken a day's quiet exercise in his garden at Cannes. There he had chiefly lived for some years previously, and there he was buried. His public life may be said to have ended some five years before.

Of the discoveries made by explorers and travellers during this period, the more important were those relating to the supposed sources of the Nile.

Captains Speke and Grant had gone with an expedition to the Lake Victoria N'Yanza, which Speke had foretold would be found to be the great source of the sacred river; the most remote waters or top-head of the Nile being the southern end of the lake, situated close on the third degree of south latitude, which, he said, gave to the Nile the surprising length in direct measurement, rolling over thirty-four degrees of latitude, of above 230 miles, or more than one-eleventh of the circumference of our globe. Speke, who came to this distinct conclusion in July, 1862, christened the "stones," Ripon Falls, after the nobleman who presided over the Royal Geographical Society when the expedition was got up. He named the arm of the water from which the Nile issued Napoleon Channel, in token of respect to the French Geographical Society, which had presented him with their gold medal for the discovery of the Victoria N'Yanza. Following the course of the White Nile Speke and Grant reached Gondokoro, where they were received by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Samuel Baker, another famous traveller, who had at later date something further to say