that now draw out their days in the dim after-sense of a mere indulged and encouraged picturesqueness. “Denis Duval” could only, it would seem, have been conceived as a “picturesque” affair; but that may serve exactly as a reason for the attempt to refigure it. Little hilltop communities sensibly even yet, with the memory of their tight walls and stiff gates not wholly extinct, Rye and Winchelsea hold fast to the faint identity which remains their least fragile support, their estate as “Antient Towns” involved (with the distincter Five and raising the number to seven), in that nominal, though still occasionally pompous Wardenship, the image—for our time—of the most famous assignment of which is preserved in Longfellow’s fine verses on the death of the Duke of Wellington. The sea, in previous times half friend, half foe, began long since to fight, in each character, shy of them, and now, in wrinkled wistfulness, they look across at the straight blue band, two miles or so away, that tells of the services they rendered, the illusions they cherished,—illusions in the case of poor Winchelsea especially absurd,—and the extreme inconvenience they repeatedly suffered. They were again and again harried and hacked by the French, and might have had, it would seem, small appetite for the company, however reduced and disarmed, of these immemorial neighbours. The retreating waters, however, had even two centuries ago already placed such dangers on a very different footing, and the recovery and evocation of some of the old processes of actual absorption may well have presented themselves to Thackeray as a problem of the sort that tempts the lover of human histories. Happy and enviable always the first trepidation of the artist who lights on a setting that “meets” his subject or on a subject that meets his setting. The editorial notes to “Denis Duval” yield unfortunately no indication of whether Winchelsea put into his head the idea of this study, or of whether he carried it about till he happened judiciously to drop it there. Appearances point, in truth, to a connection of the latter kind, for the fragment itself contains no positive evidence that Thackeray ever, with the mere eye of sense, beheld the place; which is precisely one of the ambiguities that challenge the critic and an item in the unexpectedness that I spoke of at the beginning of these remarks. What—in the light, at least, of later fashions—the place has to offer the actual observer is the effect of an object seen, a thing of aspect and suggestion, situation and colour; but what had it to offer Thackeray—or the taste of forty years ago—that he so oddly forbore to give us a tangled clew to? The impression of to-day’s reader is that the chapters we possess might really have been written without the author’s having stood on the spot; and that is just why they have, as I began by saying, so much less to contribute to our personal vision than