irremediable loss. There is an old story that Pindar had never in his
lifetime written an ode in praise of Persephone, the goddess of death and
the dead, and that after he had departed from among living men, his shade
communicated to the priests a new hymn on the Queen of Hades. The works
of great writers published after their decease have somewhat of the charm
of this fabled hymn; they are voices, familiar and unlocked for, out of
the silence. They are even stranger, when they have such a slight and
homelike interest as the trifles that fell unheeded from the pen or
pencil of one who has done great things in poetry or art. Mr.
Thackeray's sketches in the "Orphan of Pimlico" are of this
quality--caricatures thrown off to amuse children who are now grown men
and women. They have the mark of the old unmistakable style, humorous
and sad, and, as last remains, they are to be welcomed and treasured.

Mr. Thackeray's skill with the pencil bore very curious relations to his
mastery of the other art, in which lay his strength, but to which perhaps
he never gave his love. Everyone has heard how, when a young man, he was
anxious to illustrate "Pickwick," which found more fitting artists in
Seymour and H. K. Browne. Mr. Thackeray seems to have been well aware of
the limitations of his own power as a draughtsman. In one of his
"Roundabout Papers" he described the method--the secret so to say--of
Rubens; and then goes on to lament the impotence of his own hand, the
"pitiful niggling," that cannot reproduce the bold sweep of Ruben's
brush.

Thackeray was like Theophile Gautier, who began life as a painter, and
who has left to posterity a wonderful etching of his own portrait, pale,
romantic, with long sweeping moustache, and hair falling over his
shoulders. Both writers found their knowledge of the technique of
painting useful in making their appreciation of art and nature more keen