The volume called _Burlesques_, published in 1869, begins with the _Novels by Eminent Hands_, and _Jeames's Diary_, to which I have already alluded. 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 warrior,--that is, of course,--and he is one in whose wonderful narrative all that distant India can produce in the way of boasting, is superadded to Ireland's best efforts in the same line. Baron Munchausen was nothing to him; and to the bare 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 gunpowder; "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 digestion. "Once in Spain I ate the leg of a horse, and was so eager to swallow this morsel, that I bolted the shoe as well as the hoof, and never felt the slightest inconvenience from either." He storms a citadel, and has only a snuff box given him for his reward. "Never mind," says Major Gahagan; "when they want me to storm a fort again, I shall know better." By which we perceive that the major remembered his Horace, and had in his mind the soldier who had lost his purse. But the major's adventures, excellent as they are, lack the continued interest which is attached to the two following stories.