he desire? Mr. Thackeray himself was a member of The Garrick, The
Athenaeum, and The Reform, but the clubs of many of his characters, like
the "buth" of Jeames Yellowplush, are "wrapped up in a mistry." They are
alluded to by fancy names, but the scholiast on Thackeray will probably
be able to identify them. Is it not time, by the way, for that scholiast
to give his labours to the public? Thackeray's world is passing; the
children he knew, the boys he tipped and took to the play, are middle-
aged men--fogies, in fact. _Tempus edax rerum_, Time has an appetite as
good as that of a boy at his first club dinner. The meaning of the great
writer's contemporary allusions may be lost, like those of Villon and
Aristophanes. Such is the fate of comedy. Who knows, if we turn to
Dickens, what the "common profeel machine" was, or what were the steps of
the dance known as the Fanteag (the spelling is dubious); or what the
author meant by a "red-faced Nixon." Was it a nixie? Does the new
Professor of the English Language and Literature at Oxford hope to cast
the light of Teutonic research on these and similar inquiries? Sam
Weller found that oysters always went hand-in-hand with poverty. How
this must astonish a generation which finds the oyster nearly as extinct
as the ichthyosaurus! The "Book of Snobs" calls aloud for a commentator.
Who is the nobleman holding his boots out of the hotel window--an act
which the Snob very properly declined to classify as snobbish? Who are
the originals of Henry Foker (this, indeed, is known), and of Wagg and
Wenham? Or did Wenham's real name _rhyme_ to Foker, as, according to the
Mulligan, "Perkins rhymes to Jerkins, my man of firkins"? Posterity will
insist on an answer, which will be nothing if not authentic. Posterity,
_pace_ Mr. Rideing, will remember very well that George Osborne's father
lived in Russell Square, and will hunt in vain for 96. There is no such
number, any more than there ever was such a Pope as he to whom the
unfortunate old woman in "Candid" attributed her birth. Here once more,
as Voltaire justly remarks in a footnote, we observe the discretion of