The "orthogwaphy is inaccuwate," as a certain person says in the
memoirs,--"so inaccuwate" as to take a positive study to "compwehend"
it; but the joke, though old, is so handled as to be very amusing.
Thackeray soon rushes away from his criticisms on snobbism to other
matters. There are the details of a card-sharping enterprise, in which
we cannot but feel that we recognise something of the author's own
experiences in the misfortunes of Mr. Dawkins; there is the Earl of
Crab's, and then the first of those attacks which he was tempted to
make on the absurdities of his brethren of letters, and the only one
which now has the appearance of having been ill-natured. His first
victims were Dr. Dionysius Lardner and Mr. Edward Bulwer Lytton, as he
was then. We can surrender the doctor to the whip of the satirist; and
for "Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig," as the novelist is made to call
himself, we can well believe that he must himself have enjoyed the
_Yellowplush Memoirs_ if he ever re-read them in after life. The speech
in which he is made to dissuade the footman from joining the world of
letters is so good that I will venture to insert it: "Bullwig was
violently affected; a tear stood in his glistening i. 'Yellowplush,'
says he, seizing my hand, 'you _are_ right. Quit not your present
occupation; black boots, clean knives, wear plush all your life, but
don't turn literary man. Look at me. I am the first novelist in Europe.
I have ranged with eagle wings over the wide regions of literature, and
perched on every eminence in its turn. I have gazed with eagle eyes on
the sun of philosophy, and fathomed the mysterious depths of the human
mind. All languages are familiar to me, all thoughts are known to me,
all men understood by me. I have gathered wisdom from the honeyed lips
of Plato, as we wandered in the gardens of the Academies; wisdom, too,
from the mouth of Job Johnson, as we smoked our backy in Seven Dials.
Such must be the studies, and such is the mission, in this world of the
Poet-Philosopher. But the knowledge is only emptiness; the initiation is