Never was a secret more impenetrably kept. Read over the fragment—which reaches, after all, to some two hundred and fifty pages; read over, at the end of the volume, the interesting editorial notes; address yourself, above all, in the charming series of introductions lately prepared by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie for a new and, so far as possible, biographical edition of her father’s works, to the reminiscences briefly bearing on Denis, and you will remain in each case equally distant from a clew. It is the most puzzling thing in the world, but there _is_ no clew. There are indications, in respect to the book, from Thackeray’s hand, memoranda on matters of detail, and there is in especial a highly curious letter to his publisher; yet the clew that his own mind must have held never shows the tip of its tail. The letter to his publisher, in which, according to the editor of the fragment, he “sketches his plot for the information of” that gentleman, reads like a mystification by which the gentleman was to be temporarily kept quiet. With an air of telling him a good deal, Thackeray really tells him nothing—nothing, I mean, by which he himself would have been committed to (any more than deterred from) any idea kept up his sleeve. If he were holding this card back, to be played at his own time, he could not have proceeded in the least differently; and one can construct to-day, with a free hand, one’s picture of his private amusement at the success of his diplomacy. All the while, what _was_ the card? The production of a novel finds perhaps its nearest analogy in the ride across country; the competent novelist—that is, the novelist with the real seat—presses his subject, in spite of hedges and ditches, as hard as the keen fox-hunter presses the game that has been started for his day with the hounds. The fox is the novelist’s idea, and when he rides straight, he rides, regardless of danger, in whatever direction that animal takes. As we lay down “Denis Duval,” however, we feel not only that we are off the scent, but that we never really have been, with the author, on it. The fox has got quite away. For it carries us no further, surely, to say—as may possibly be objected—that the author’s subject was to have been neither more nor less than the adventures of his hero; inasmuch as, turn the thing as we will, these “adventures” could at the best have constituted nothing more than its _form_. It is an affront to the memory of a great writer to pretend that they were to have been arbitrary and unselected, that there was nothing in his mind to determine them. The book was, obviously, to have been, as boys say, “about” them. But what were _they_ to have been about? Thackeray carried the mystery to his grave. II