As a poetical commentary on these beautiful passages, every reader of Joanna Baillie will remember the night scene in De Montfort, where the cry of the Owl suggests such different feelings and associations to the two men who listen to it, under such different circumstances. To De Montfort it is the screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,—and he stands and shudders at the “instinctive wailing.” To Rezenvelt it is the sound which recalls his boyish days, when he merrily mimicked the night-bird till it returned him cry for cry,—and he pauses to listen with a fanciful delight. [Illustration] THACKERAY’S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS (1833.) 95. A Lecture should not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. As _lectures_, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and animation on the part of the speaker: as _essays_, they atone in eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of style. Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when I heard them, (and it strikes me now in turning over the written pages,) is this: we deal here with writers and artists, yet the purpose, from beginning to end, is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers to bring them better acquainted with the writings of these writers, or to illustrate the wit of these wits, or to enhance the humour of these humourists;—no; but to deal justice on the men as _men_—to tell us how _they_ lived, and loved, suffered and made suffer, who still have power to pain or to please; to settle _their_ claims to our praise or blame, our love or hate, whose right to fame was settled long ago, and remains undisputed. This is his purpose. Thus then he has laid down and acted on the principle that “morals have something to do with art;” that there is a moral account to be settled with men of genius; that the power and the right remains with us to do justice on those who being dead yet rule our spirits from their urns; to try them by a standard which perhaps neither themselves, nor those around them, would have admitted. Did Swift when he bullied men, lampooned women, trampled over decency and humanity, flung round him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when before a company of intellectual men, and thinking, feeling women, in both hemispheres, he should be called up to judgment, hands bound, tongue-tied? Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors? Thackeray turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a warning; probes the lacerated self-love, holds up to scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable egotism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O Vanessa! are you not avenged?