intention was never carried out. In _The King over the Water_, 1908,
Miss A. Shield and Mr. Andrew Lang have recently examined another
portrait in _Esmond_,--that of the Chevalier de St. George,--not without
injury to its historical veracity. In these matters, Mr. Lang--like Rob
Roy--is on his native heath; and it is only necessary to refer the
reader to this highly interesting study.


But although, with our rectified information, we may except against the
picture of Steele as a man, we can scarcely cavil at the reproduction of
his manner as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at Charterhouse,
his imitative faculty had been exceptional; and he displayed it
triumphantly in his maturity by those _Novels by Eminent Hands_ in which
the authors chosen are at once caricatured and criticised. The thing is
more than the gift of parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison has
rightly said) to positive forgery. It is present in all his works, in
stray letters and detached passages.

In its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circumstantial
report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in _Denis Duval_; and in
the missive in barbarous French of the Dowager Viscountess
Castlewood[70]--a letter which only requires the sprawling, childish
script to make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary efforts of
that "baby-faced" Caroline beauty who was accustomed to sign herself "L
duchesse de Portsmout." It is better still in the letter from Walpole to
General Conway in chap. xl. of _The Virginians_, which is perfect, even
to the indifferent pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But the
crown and top of these _pastiches_ is certainly the delightful paper,
which pretends to be No. 341 of the _Spectator_ for All Fools' Day,
1712, in which Colonel Esmond treats "Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix," to