so much more realistic to his generation than it does to ours was that his particular point of view was that of the satirist, and his satire was largely directed to the exposure of cant, humbug, affectation, and other forms of unreality. Disillusion was his trade. He had no heroes, and he saw all things in their unheroic and unromantic aspect. You all know his famous caricature of Ludovicus Rex inside and outside of his court clothes: a most majestic, bewigged and beruffled _grand monarque_: and then a spindle-shanked, pot-bellied, bald little man—a good illustration for a chapter in “Sartor Resartus.” The ship in which Thackeray was sent home from India, a boy of six, touched at St. Helena and he saw Napoleon. He always remembered him as a little fat man in a suit of white duck and a palm-leaf hat. Thackeray detested pose and strut and sham heroics. He called Byron “a big sulky dandy.” “Lord Byron,” he said, “wrote more cant . . . than any poet I know of. Think of the ‘peasant girls with dark blue eyes’ of the Rhine—the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of ‘filling high a cup of Samian wine’: . . . Byron himself always drank gin.” The captain in “The White Squall” does not pace the deck like a dark-browed corsair, but calls, “George, some brandy and water!” And this reminds me of Thackeray’s poetry. Of course one who held this attitude toward the romantic and the heroic could not be a poet in the usual sense. Poetry holds the quintessential truth, but, as Bacon says, it “subdues the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; while realism clings to the shows of things, and satire disenchants, ravels the magic web which the imagination weaves. Heine was both satirist and poet, but he was each by turns, and he had the touch of ideality which Thackeray lacked. Yet Thackeray wrote poetry and good poetry of a sort. But it has beauty purely of sentiment, never of the imagination that transcends the fact. Take the famous lines with which this same “White Squall” closes: And when, its force expended, The harmless storm was ended, And as the sunrise splendid Came blushing o’er the sea; I thought, as day was breaking, My little girls were waking And smiling and making A prayer at home for me. And such is the quality of all his best things in verse—“The Mahogany Tree,” “The Ballad of Bouillebaisse,” “The End of the Play”; a mixture of humor and pensiveness, homely fact and sincere feeling.