every Tuesday evening she disappeared; we tried to watch her, but in vain, she was always off by nine p.m. and was away all night, coming back wearied and all over mud, as if she had travelled far. She slept all next day. This went on for some months, and we could make nothing of it. Poor dear creature, she looked at us wistfully when she came in, as if she would have told us if she could, and was especially fond, though tired.

Well, one day I was walking across the Grassmarket, with Wylie at my heels, when two shepherds started, and looking at her, one said, "That's her; that's the wonderfu' wee bitch that naebody kens." I asked him what he meant, and he told me that for months past she had made her appearance by the first daylight at the "buchts" or sheep-pens in the cattle-market, and worked incessantly in helping the shepherds to get their sheep and lambs in. The man said with a sort of transport, "She's a perfect meeracle; flees about like a speerit, and never gangs wrang; wears but never grups, and beats a' oor dowgs. She's a perfect meeracle, and as soople as a maukin." Then he related how they all knew her, and said, "There's that wee fell yin; we'll get them in noo." They tried to coax her to stop and be caught, but no, she was gentle, but off; and for many a day "that wee fell yin". was spoken of by these rough fellows. continued this amateur work till she died, which she did in peace.

She

It is very touching the regard the south country shepherds have to their dogs. Professor Syme one day, many years ago, when living in Forres Street, was looking out of his window, and he saw a young shepherd striding down North Charlotte Street, as if making for his house: it was midsummer. The man had his dog with him, and Mr. Syme noticed that he followed the dog, and not it him, though he contrived to steer for the house. He came, and was ushered into his room; he wished advice about some ailment, and Mr. Syme saw that he had a bit of twine round the dog's neck, which he let drop out of his hand when he entered the room. He asked him the meaning of this, and he explained that the magistrates had issued a mad-dog proclamation, commanding all dogs to be muzzled or led on pain of death. "And why do you go about as I saw you did before you came into me?" "Oh," said he, looking awkward, "I didna want Birkie to ken he was tied." Where will you find truer courtesy and finer feeling? He didn't want to hurt Birkie's feelings.

Mr. Carruthers of Inverness told me a new story of these wise sheep-dogs. A butcher from Inverness had purchased some sheep at Dingwall, and giving them in charge to his dog, left the road. The dog drove them on, till coming to a toll, the toll-wife stood before the drove, demanding her dues. The dog looked at her, and, jumping on her back, crossed his forelegs over her arms. The sheep passed through, and the dog took his place behind them and went on his way.

(From the Same.)

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE
MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

[By Thackeray's own desire no full authentic account of his life has been published. It was neither a long life, nor in the ordinary sense an eventful one. He was born at Calcutta, the son of Richmond Thackeray and Anne Becher, on 18th July 1811; and he died at Kensington on 24th December 1862. He was educated at the Charterhouse, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where, though he took no degree, he made some announcement of his tastes and powers in a periodical called The Snob, and in a burlesque poem on the prize subject of "Timbuctoo," on which Tennyson wrote seriously. He had inherited a competence, but it was lost in injudicious newspaper speculations and otherwise, and by the time when he was five-and-twenty he had to write, not for his amusement but for his bread. He married, however, in 1836, but after a brief married life Mrs. Thackeray was attacked by a mental disorder which never left her, though she survived her husband by more than thirty years. For some time Thackeray, though a prolific writer, did not make the mark that was in him to make, and it was not till Vanity Fair appeared (in parts, it was completed in 1848) that his genius was properly recognised. This was followed by Pendennis (1850), Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1855), and The Virginians (1859). On the foundation of the Cornhill Magazine Thackeray was appointed its editor, a post which he did not find in all ways congenial; but he contributed to it some of his very best work in the Roundabout Papers. His minor work, both in prose and verse, was very considerable, but difficult to enumerate in brief space. It included Catherine (1840); Barry Lyndon; The Paris (1840), Irish (1843), and Eastern (1845) Sketch Books; Philip; and the unfinished Denis Duval, which his death cut short; besides lectures on the English Humourists and the Four Georges, several Christmas Books, many prose articles, and much light verse.]

THERE are few exercises in that idle speculation on the mighthave-been, which nobody has satirised more frequently or more sharply than Thackeray himself, so tempting as the enquiry what would have happened, as far as literature is concerned, if he had not lost his fortune so early, and had not been forced to write for a living. Despite, or because of this compulsion he was never exactly an industrious man; he never wrote

with anything like the rapidity of most men, and especially of most novelists who betake themselves to regular work with the pen; the personal shudder with which he commemorates George Warrington's labelling of his press work as les chaînes de Pesclavage is unmistakable; and he was to the last reluctant to give up the social amusements, the unchecked wanderings, the periods of passive observation and active enjoyment which— though they are perhaps more valuable to the man of letters than to anybody else the man of letters who is not born to fortune generally finds that he has to forego. On the other hand, the almost irresistible attraction which drew Thackeray to literature is obvious. He practised writing in his undergraduate days, he practised it while that fortune still lasted which he unluckily wasted, at least in part, on newspaper support, forgetting the sound and important doctrine that those who serve the altar should live of the altar, not it of them! It is almost impossible to conceive a Thackeray who should not have written Thackeray's works. Yet again we know that a small independent fortune such as his (for indisputable authority says that it never exceeded five hundred a year), though it ought to be the very sinews of literary exertion is more often its pillow, and a pillow which sometimes smothers it.

What, however, may be said with very little if with any rashness, is that the peculiar circumstances of his earlier years left in more ways than one their mark on his style. If he had regularly trained himself for writing in his youth, or if, like Gibbon and others, he had adopted it as a majestic and unhurried diversion for his middle and maturer years, there can be little doubt that his writing would have exhibited fewer signs of the amateurish, not to say the slipshod, than in its earlier stages it actually does. It has been a commonplace (since it was first pointed out some years ago) to observe that Thackeray is more than once conquered by the temptation to use "and which" when there is no precedent relative expressed or even implied in a participle or an elliptic clause; and not a few other things of the same kind might be unearthed. There is no difficulty (especially in that most interesting volume of recovered chaînes de l'esclavage which was at last published in 1886 to complete his works) in discovering numerous signs, if not of "the young gentleman who was plucked for his degree," as Warrington the younger says, at any rate of the young gentleman who did not take it, of the literary aspirant who, as Pendennis himself con

fesses "knew very little about politics or history, and had but a smattering of letters." He never became a learned writer, and long after the fire of his genius, the unconquerable and unmistakable quality of his idiosyncrasy, had made him a style among the most delightful in English, it would have been possible for the composition master or the peddling critic to find fault with many of his sentences as clumsy, and perhaps with some as positively incorrect.

It was not that he was not ambitious, that he had not a certain longing for the academic status of Dr. Slocum and Professor Sadiman. There is a passage (I think in the Letters published by Mrs. Brookfield) which complains of the reluctance of editors to entrust him with the more serious tasks of reviewing and article-writing, of the way in which he was forced towards and confined in the paths of burlesque, satire, and the like. These editors may or may not have been wrong, but we owe them a deep debt of gratitude. It is, considering Thackeray's nature and tastes, but too probable that if abundance of well-paid work in journalism of the more dignified (and therefore, on the principle of compensation, of the more ephemeral) kind had offered itself, he would have been content with the work and the gains, and would have given up that time which was meant for literature proper to the relaxation which is to nobody more tempting than to the journalist. The gods were kinder to him. They kept him for some dozen years making sport-very good sport sometimes, if never of the very best-for the Philistines at indifferent wages, and this practice served as the apprenticeship to immortal work in his proper sphere-work which, to do the public justice, was pretty readily recognised, and which he never had occasion thereafter to give up, either for lack of demand or for lack of reward.

It is however very remarkable, though it perhaps has not always been remarked, how uniform Thackeray's literary characteristics are. It is usual, and is sufficiently correct, to describe him as standing to Fielding in very much the same relation as that in which Dickens stands to Smollett. But the resemblance is far less intimate and pervading in the one case than in the other. Thackeray and Fielding are alike in their almost always kindly, but for the most part rather melancholy, humour, in the singular perfection with which each (when he had arrived at the practice of the art in which he was born a master) succeeded in imparting life, character, individuality to all his personages,