taining his friends from Winchelsea, he received orders to sail for Hull, and place himself under the command of the admiral there. From the Humber we presently were dispatched northward to Scarborough. There had been not a little excitement along the whole northern coast for some time past, in consequence of the appearance of some American privateers, who had ransacked a Scottish nobleman's castle, and levied contributions from a Cumberland seaport town. As we were close in with Scarborough a boat came off with letters from the magistrates of that place, announcing that this squadron had actually been seen off the coast. The commodore of this wandering piratical expedition was known to be a rebel Scotchman fought with a rope round his neck to be sure. No doubt many of us youngsters vapoured about the courage with which we would engage him, and made certain, if we could only meet with him, of seeing him hang from his own yardarm. It was Diis aliter visum, as we used to say at Pocock's; and it was we threw deuceace too. Traitor, if you will, was Monsieur John Paul Jones, afterwards knight of his Most Christian Majesty's Order of Merit; but a braver traitor never wore sword.

who

We had been sent for in order to protect a fleet of merchantmen that were bound to the Baltic, and were to sail under the convoy of our ship and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Captain Piercy. And thus it came about that after being twenty-five days in his Majesty's service, I had the fortune to be present at one of the most severe and desperate combats that has been fought in our or any time.

I shall not attempt to tell that story of the battle of the 23rd September, which ended in our glorious captain striking his own colours to our superior and irresistible enemy. Sir Richard has told the story of his disaster in words nobler than any I could supply, who, though indeed engaged in that fearful action in which our flag went down before a renegade Briton and his motley crew, saw but a very small portion of the battle which ended so fatally for us. It did not commence till nightfall. How well I remember the sound of the enemy's gun of which the shot crashed into our side in reply to the challenge of our captain who hailed her! Then came a broadside from us— the first I had ever heard in battle.

NOTES

THE readers of the Cornhill Magazine have now read the last line written by William Makepeace Thackeray. The story breaks off as his life ended-full of vigour, and blooming with new promise like the apple-trees in this month of May:1 the only difference between the work and the life is this, that the last chapters of the one have their little pathetical gaps and breaks of unfinished effort, the last chapters of the other were fulfilled and complete. But the life may be left alone; while as for the gaps and breaks in his last pages, nothing that we can write is likely to add to their significance. There they are; and the reader's mind has already fallen into them, with sensations not to be improved by the ordinary commentator. If Mr. Thackeray himself could do it, that would be another thing. Preacher he called himself in some of the Roundabout discourses in which his softer spirit is always to be heard, but he never had a text after his own mind so much as these last broken chapters would give him now. There is the date of a certain Friday to be filled in, and Time is no more. Is it very presumptuous to imagine the Roundabout that Mr. Thackeray would write upon this unfinished work of his, if he could come back to do it? We do not think it is, or very difficult either. What Carlyle calls the divine gift of speech was so largely his, especially in his maturer years, that he made clear in what he did say pretty much what he would say about anything that engaged his thought; and we have only to imagine a discourse On the Two Women at the Mill',2 to read off upon our minds the sense of what Mr. Thackeray alone could have found language for.

Vain are these speculations-or are they vain? Not if we try to think what he would think of his broken labours, considering that one of these days our labours must be broken too. Still, there is not much to be said about it; and we pass on to the real business in hand, which is to show as well as we may what Denis Duval 1 The last number of Denis Duval appeared in the Cornhill Magazine of June, 1864.

2 Two women shall be grinding at the mill, one shall be taken and the other left.'

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would have been had its author lived to complete his work. Fragmentary as it is, the story must always be of considerable importance, because it will stand as a warning to imperfect critics never to be in haste to cry of any intellect, His vein is worked out there is nothing left in him but the echoes of emptiness.' The decriers were never of any importance, yet there is more than satisfaction, there is something like triumph in the mind of every honest man of letters when he sees, and knows everybody must see, how a genius which was sometimes said to have been guilty of passing behind a cloud toward the evening of his day, came out to shine with new splendour before the day was done. Denis Duval is unfinished, but it ends that question. The fiery genius that blazed over the city in Vanity Fair, and passed on to a ripe afternoon in Esmond, is not a whit less great, it is only broader, more soft, more mellow and kindly, as it sinks too suddenly in Denis Duval.

This is said to introduce the settlement of another too-hasty notion which we believe to have been pretty generally accepted namely, that Mr. Thackeray took little pains in the construction of his works. The truth is, that he very industriously did take pains. We find that out when we inquire, for the benefit of the readers of his Magazine, whether there is anything to tell of his designs. for Denis Duval. The answer comes in the form of many most careful notes, and memoranda of inquiry into minute matters of detail to make the story true. How many young novelists are there who haven't much genius to fall back upon, who yet, if they desired to set their hero down in Winchelsea a hundred years ago for instance, would take the trouble to learn how the town was built, and what gate led to Rye (if the hero happened to have any dealings with that place), and who were its local magnates, and how it was governed? And yet this is what Mr. Thackeray did, though his investigation added not twenty lines to the story and no interest whatever it was simply so much conscientious effort to keep as near truth in feigning as he could. That Winchelsea had three gates, Newgate on SW., Landgate on NE., Strandgate (leading to Rye) on SE.'; that the government was vested in a mayor and twelve jurats, jointly'; that it sends canopy bearers on occasion of a coronation', &c. &c. &c., all is

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duly entered in a notebook with reference to authorities. And so about the refugees at Rye, and the French Reformed Church there; nothing is written that history cannot vouch for. The neat and orderly way in which the notes are set down is also remarkable. Each has its heading, as thus:

Refugees at Rye.-At Rye is a small settlement of French refugees, who are for the most part fishermen, and have a minister of their own.

French Reformed Church.-Wherever there is a sufficient number of faithful there is a church. The pastor is admitted to his office by the provincial synod, or the colloquy, provided it be composed of seven pastors at least. Pastors are seconded in their duties by laymen, who take the title of Ancients, Elders, and Deacons precentors. The union of Pastors, Deacons, and Elders forms a consistory.

Of course there is no considerable merit in care like this, but it is a merit which the author of Denis Duval is not popularly credited with, and therefore it may as well be set down to him. Besides, it may serve as an example to fledgeling geniuses of what he thought necessary to the perfection of his work.

But the chief interest of these notes and memoranda lies in the outlook they give us upon the conduct of the story. It is not desirable to print them all; indeed, to do so would be to copy a long list of mere references to books, magazines, and journals, where such byway bits of illustration are to be found as lit Mr. Thackeray's mind to so vivid an insight into manners and character. Still, we are anxious to give the reader as complete an idea of the story as we can.

First, here is a characteristic letter, in which Mr. Thackeray sketches his plot for the information of his publisher :MY DEAR S.,

I was born in the year 1764, at Winchelsea, where my father was a grocer and clerk of the church. Everybody in the place was a good deal connected with smuggling.

There used to come to our house a very noble French gentleman, called the COUNT DE LA MOTTE, and with him a German, the BARON DE LÜTTERLOH. My father used to take packages to Ostend and Calais for these two gentlemen, and perhaps I went to Paris once and saw the French queen.

The squire of our town was SQUIRE WESTON of the Priory, who, with his brother, kept one of the genteelest houses in the country. He was churchwarden of our church, and much respected. Yes, but if you read the Annual Register of 1781, you will find, that on the

13th July, the sheriffs attended at the TOWER OF LONDON to receive custody of a De la Motte, a prisoner charged with high treason. The fact is, this Alsatian nobleman being in difficulties in his own country (where he had commanded the Regiment Soubise), came to London, and under pretence of sending prints to France and Ostend, supplied the French Ministers with accounts of the movements of the English fleets and troops. His go-between was Lütterloh, a Brunswicker, who had been a crimping agent, then a servant, who was a spy of France and Mr. Franklin, and who turned king's evidence on La Motte, and hanged him.

This Lütterloh, who had been a crimping agent for German troops during the American war, then a servant in London during the Gordon riots, then an agent for a spy, then a spy over a spy, I suspect to have been a consummate scoundrel, and doubly odious from speaking English with a German accent.

What if he wanted to marry THAT CHARMING GIRL, who lived with Mr. Weston, at Winchelsea? Ha! I see a mystery here.

What if this scoundrel, going to receive his pay from the English admiral, with whom he was in communication at Portsmouth, happened to go on board the Royal George the day she went down?

As for John and Joseph Weston, of the Priory, I am sorry to say they were rascals too. They were tried for robbing the Bristol mail in 1780; and being acquitted for want of evidence, were tried immediately after on another indictment for forgery-Joseph was acquitted, but George was capitally convicted. But this did not help poor Joseph. Before their trials, they and some others broke out of Newgate, and Joseph fired at, and wounded, a porter, who tried to stop him, on Snow Hill. For this he was tried and found guilty on the Black Act, and hung along with his brother.

Now, if I was an innocent participator in De la Motte's treasons, and the Westons' forgeries and robberies, what pretty scrapes I must have been in!

I married the young woman, whom the brutal Lütterloh would have had for himself, and lived happy ever after.

Here, it will be seen, the general idea is very roughly sketched, and the sketch was not in all its parts carried out. Another letter, never sent to its destination, gives a somewhat later account of Denis,—

My grandfather's name was Duval, he was a barber and perruquier by trade, and elder of the French Protestant Church at Winchelsea. I was sent to board with his correspondent, a Methodist grocer, at Rye.

These two kept a fishing-boat, but the fish they caught was many and many a barrel of Nantz brandy, which we landed—never mind where at a place to us well known. In the innocence of my heart, I-a child-got leave to go out fishing. We used to go out at night and meet ships from the French coast.