NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE great event of the week to England is the loss of her great satirist Mr. Thackeray, who died early on the 24th of Decem- ber, in the fifty-second year of his age, of effusion on the brain, brought on, it is supposed, by violent sickness, to which he was periodically subject. Of a new novel promised by him to the Corn bill Magazine he had completed four numbers, and only two or three days before his death was showing his achievement to a friend in the most buoyant spirits. His death at the season which has so often been associated with his lighter literary efforts strikes us with something of the same imaginative effect as those Christmas books themselves, in which the thin veil of superficial gaiety was con- stantly blowing aside, and showing the graduated depths of darkness beneath. He is the founder of a school of satire of which he will probably be the only master, though he has already had many Imitators. We do not wonder that he failed as a painter, for painting, which must select an effect visible in a single Moment of time, gave no scope to the peculiar mobility of his genius. , Be delighted in varying indefinitely the expression visible on the face of his characters, so that before the contraction of the suffer- ing nerve, or the sneer of the parted lips was distinctly visible, it was gone, andif you sought to recover the source of the impression it was-seldom easy to do so. There was a strange mixture of pain and pathos in all his pictures ; bitterness and tenderness mingled their tones in the laugh of the humourist, and there was some- thing at once loving and fatalistic about the frequent gleams of his religious feeling. Tennyson has expressed the essence of his genius, though not its highest temper, in the line— "Out of that mood was born
Self-scorn—and then laughter at that self-scorn."
