As so much of Thackeray's writing partakes of the nature of burlesque¹, it would have been unnecessary to devote a separate chapter to the subject, were it not that there are among his tales two or three so exceedingly good of their kind, coming so entirely³ up to our idea of what a prose burlesque should be, that were I to omit to mention them I should pass over a distinctive⁴ portion of our author's work.

The volume called Burlesques⁵, published in 1869, begins with the Novels by Eminent⁶ Hands, and Jeames's Diary, to which I have already alluded⁷. It contains also The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan, A Legend of the Rhine, and Rebecca and Rowena. It is of these that I will now speak. The History of the Next French Revolution and Cox's Diary, with which the volume is concluded, are, according to my thinking, hardly equal to the others; nor are they so properly called burlesques.

Nor will I say much of Major Gahagan, though his adventures are very good fun. He is a warrior⁸,—that is, of course,—and he is one in whose wonderful narrative⁹ all that distant India can produce in the way of boasting, is superadded to Ireland's best efforts in the same line. Baron¹⁰ Munchausen was nothing to him; and to the bare [Pg 140]and simple miracles of the baron is joined that humour without which Thackeray never tells any story. This is broad enough, no doubt, but is still humour;—as when the major tells us that he always kept in his own apartment a small store of gunpowder¹¹; "always keeping it under my bed, with a candle burning for fear of accidents." Or when he describes his courage; "I was running,—running as the brave stag before the hounds,—running, as I have done a great number of times in my life, when there was no help for it but a run." Then he tells us of his

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