case only lesser than his own, in the other case as impotent and impertinent as the hand of his very worst and latest commentator, ventured to rehandle and recast into the shapes under which we know them as 'Timon of Athens' and 'The Two Noble Kinsmen.' Too soon after he had 'taken to foster' Charlotte Brontë's little orphan tale of 'Emma', Mr. Thackeray had in turn to leave half unshapen, and recognisable only by grand rough indications of its giant parentage, what should have been the stateliest and most stalwart offspring of his latter years—born to disprove the premature charge of comparative decadence and debility not unjustly incurred by its more immediate predecessors; then the great man so improperly rated as his rival passed also away in the mid heat of
