blow in the chest as he came on unable to stop. With a yell of rage the foreman lifted his pistol and brought it down with a crash upon his opponent's head. In a gray heap the trespasser dropped. Another match was struck, revealing Sir Charles Custance's rubicund features, down which a slow trickle of blood wound its way. "That's the lot, I s'pose!" commented the foreman grimly, as he bundled the portly frame of the magistrate into the

van.

Having done so, he addressed the interior at large, "I'm a-watching outside, and if yer so much as kawf or blow yer noses, I'll shoot through the sides with this 'ere damned ole blunderbus. D'ye 'ear, old cockies?"

With that he banged the doors to, barred and padlocked them, and sat on the tail-board watching the grayness of the dawn steal through the trees, struggling to keep himself awake. He was still so occupied when, at half-past seven, a distant rumble announced the arrival of the expected pantechnicon from Lowestoft. As it slowly lumbered up the drive, the foreman grinned, and he grinned more broadly when he saw Bindle slip off from the tailboard, followed by Ginger.

"Mornin', Bindle; mornin' Ginger," he called out politely. "Slep' well?” Bindle and Ginger grinned. "Now, one o' you two go an' get my breakfast, and the other telephone for the perlice." The men stared at him. "Ginger," he continued complacently, "you'll find two eggs and some bacon in the 'all, and a stove in the kitchen, an' a pot of coffee which only wants warmin' up. I'm 'ungry, Ginger-as 'ungry as 'ell is for you, Ginger. Bindle, give my compliments to the perlice at Lowestoft, and ast them to send four scarlet peelers over 'ere at once to take charge o' what I caught larst night.

"Yes, Bindle, old sport, I've got 'em all-all in Black Maria." and he

jerked his thumb in the direction of the empty pantechnicon. "All yer very dear pals, ole son. Like to see

'em ?"

Bindle looked puzzled; but when the foreman had explained, his grin transcended in its breadth and good-humor that of his superior. Then the foreman changed the style of his idiom. and his subordinates went their ways as he had intended and directed that they should.

The

In it

The foreman was just finishing his breakfast by wiping a piece of bread round the plate, when there reached him the sound of a motor-car chunking its way along in the distance. The news of the night's doings had spread rapidly, and a small crowd was collected round the gates of Holmleigh. Bindle grinned through the bars, and occasionally threw to the curious neighbors bits of information. car approached and drew up. was a tall, spare man of about thirtyeight or forty, with thin, angular features. He seemed surprised to see the crowd; but turning the car through the open gates drove slowly up to the house. The crowd recognized the stranger as Mr. Richard Miller, the new tenant of Holmleigh. He nodded to the foreman, who immediately descended from the tail-board and approached.

"Good! mornin', sir," he said. "You're 'ere earlier than I 'ad 'oped, sir; but that's on the lucky side. I've been 'aving rather a lively night, sir." At this moment there was a loud and continuous pounding from within the pantechnicon that he had just left.

.

"If you're not quiet I'll shoot, God forgive me, but I will," he yelled over bis shoulder. Then turning to Mr. Miller he winked jocosely. "Gettin' a bit impatient, sir. I've 'ad 'em there for several hours now. Ah? 'ere's the perlice!"

As he spoke another car appeared round the bend of the drive, and an Inspector in uniform and three plainclothes men got out.

"Now there's goin' to be some fun," he chuckled to himself as, addressing Mr. Miller, he told of the happenings of the night before. When he had finished, the features of Bindle, who had been relieved by Ginger, were suffused with a grin so broad and good-humored that it contrasted strangely with the astonishment written on the faces of the others.

"That's the story, gentlemen, and there's my bag," jerking his thumb in the direction of the pantechnicon. "Four of 'em there are, I counted 'em carefully, an' every one a Charles Peace. You'd better be careful as you let 'em out," he added. "I 'adn't time to search 'em. They came so quick, like flies in summer."

The Inspector breathed hard, Mr. Miller looked grave and concerned, the plain-clothes men looked blank, Bindle looked cheerful, whilst the foreman looked as a man looks only once in the course of his life. Deliberately he approached the tail of the van, undid the lock, removed the bar, threw open the doors, and stood quietly aside. For fully half a minute nothing happened, then the portly form of Sergeant Wrannock emerged.

"Wrannock!" gasped the Inspector from Lowestoft. The Sergeant forgot to salute his superior officer. He was humiliated. His collar was torn, one eye was black, and his nose was swollen. Closely following him came Sir Charles Custance and Mr. Greenhales, who between them supported Mr. Gandy, wheezing pitifully. All were much battered. Sir Charles's face was covered with blood, Mr. Greenhales had lost his wig and his false teeth, whilst Mr. Gandy had lost the power to move.

"What in Heaven's name is the

meaning of this?" asked the Inspector from Lowestoft.

"It means," thundered Sir Charles, who was the first to find his voice, "that we have been brutally and murderously assaulted by a band of ruffians."

"That's me and me only!" commented the foreman complacently. "I'm the band, ole cockie, and don't you forget it."

"It means," said Sergeant Wrannock, "that having information that this house was packed with firearms, I came to make investigation and

"Got caught, ole son," interpolated the foreman.

"Hold your tongue!" shouted Mr. Greenhales, in a hollow, toothless voice, dancing with fury. "Hold your tongue! You shall suffer for this."

At last, from the incoherent shoutings and reproaches in which the words "German," "Spies," "Herr Müller," were bandied back and forth, Mr. Miller and the Inspector from Lowestoft pieced together the story of how four patriots had been overcome by one foreman pantechnicon-man. The Inspector from Lowestoft turned to Mr. Miller.

"As a matter of form, sir, and in the execution of my duty, I should be glad to know if it is true that your house is full of arms and ammunition?" he asked politely.

"Of arms, certainly, Inspector, most certainly," Mr. Miller replied. "I am supposed to have the finest collection of firearms in the country. Come and see them, or such as are unpacked."

And the Inspector from Lowestoft looked at Sergeant Wrannock, and the plain-clothes constables looked away from him, and Sir Charles and Mr. Greenhales looked lustfully round for Bindle; but Bindle was not to be seen. As the Inspector and Mr. Miller, with the foreman, entered the house, Sir Charles and Mr. Greenhales walked

down the drive as men stupefied, leaving the host of the "Dove and Easel" wheezing upon the gravel. Sergeant Wrannock watched the doorway through which his superior officer had disappeared as a man might look who had suddenly been petrified by a great horror, and the three plain-clothes men stood aside talking to Ginger, who was Blackwood's Magazine.

relating to them some biographical particulars of his hero-foreman.

A little farther down the drive, edging its way cautiously nearer, was the crowd. Ginger had deserted his post; for the first time in his life he was a man of importance, whose words were listened to with eagerness and respect. Herbert Ives.

A day or two before I was asked to write this article, I happened to be reading a book (the subject does not matter) which was published in 1854. The lithograph-illustrated paper-boards in which, after a fashion of the time, it was bound, were somewhat dilapidated, and even more soiled, as was natural; but on the end-papers there was pasted, almost as fresh as if it had been printed yesterday, a pink advertisement-slip informing the public that they could now buy "The Works of ENGLAND'S GREATEST LIVING NOVELIST" (the three first words in small, the last in large caps) for "a sum very often given merely to read them," to wit eighteenpence a volume. The pecuniary estimate was somewhat excessive; for, so far as I remember, even seaside circulating libraries did not make you pay sixpence a volume for three-volume books, though they often, and wisely, did insist on a "deposit." But that is not the present point of interest, which concerns another estimate in another line of value. Who could-without absurdity even in the mouths of his own publishersbe called "England's greatest living novelist" in the year 1854?

It was, of course, a great period of novel-writing; it is probable that Prince Posterity will allow it to be the greatest ever known in England.

Some of the lights of its galaxy-gallery had indeed not yet appeared, or were hardly settled in their place and magnitude by astronomers. Mr. George Meredith had produced nothing but verse. Charlotte Brontë's brief life was all but over, and her too scanty work practically done, but she had not been registered in any part of public opinion as "greatest"-if as "great." George Eliot had not begun. Reade, and Kingsley, and Trollope had; so also had Mrs. Gaskell. But "Westward Ho!" was only of this very year; "The Warden" of the next; and "It Is Never Too Late to Mend" of the year after that. There were only three writers of fiction who (without the aforesaid absurdity) could be described in the words quoted-Bulwer, Dickens, and Thackeray. The first, after writing novels in great numbers, and in considerable variety, for nearly thirty years, had just-with that curious versatility of his which has not always been duly recognized-taken to a fresh style in "My Novel." Dickens had just finished "Bleak House," and was beginning to make his more critical admirers look rather uneasily at each other as to "Hard Times." Thackeray, after an almost unexampled struggle of nearly twenty years. not merely with public coldness, but with certain strange hampers of tem

perament and craftsmanship on his own part, had at last and for some seven years "got himself ready" and with the four great victories of "Vanity Fair," "Pendennis," "Esmond," and "The Newcomes" had conquered his place.

Not, however, with our friend of the pink advertisement. He thought-not merely as it was his duty, being a puffmaker, to do, but in common with a very large number of the people of England itself-that Bulwer was the greatest living novelist. I say that a great number of people would have agreed with him, and I am by no means sure that it would not have been the greatest number. At any rate Bulwer would have had, so far as mere popularity went, only Dickens to contend with. If you weighed the votes, instead of counting them, Thackeray might have had more than a chance; but, on a general poll of the never-mind-how-many-millions mostly never-mind-what, he would certainly not have had the faintest.

How far that chance would have been increased since must be a matter of individual and rather hazardous calculation. Bulwer, indeed, must have dropped pretty well out of the running for a long time. I fancy he had done so, despite the extraordinary cleverness of his latest books, even before his own death. He never quite won the weight-carrying votes; and "A Strange Story" was about his last successful appeal to the numbers. Dickens, I suppose, has held his own pretty steadily, both as regards the quantity and the quality of the admiration and predilection bestowed upon him. It is less easy to trace the record of Thackeray's always lesser popularity. It has certainly not, as a whole, sunk; that fact may be said to be proved to demonstration by the issue, as copyrights fell in, not merely of individual books, but of whole sets, containing a

great deal of work which never has been, and hardly ever can be, in any wide sense popular. But whether it has grown in due proportion to the increase of reading and of the booktrade, is a point on which I am very uncertain. Nor is it possible to be much more positive as to the position of what I have called the weight-carrying vote. It is still very considerable; the really competent critic, professional or amateur, who like Matthew Arnold "does not think Thackeray a great writer," must be, as Matthew Arnold himself, by the usual irony of Fate, undoubtedly was, a slave of Caprice of one sort or another. But I rather doubt whether, if you could catch in a net the exceedingly undulating and diverse body of persons who intelligently like literature, and know something about it, and could poll them, the voters for Thackeray would be quite SO numerous in proportion as they would have been had a similar process been carried out, say, thirty years ago. At any rate, if there were a decrease it would not surprise me, for reasons which, except perhaps by some future glances, it would be impertinent to give in this place.

I need, however, hardly say that this test of popularity (that is to say, of general vogue at any particular moment) is, on any really critical estimate, merely curious and hardly in the least important. Nothing like sufficient time has passed for anything like a sufficient perspective to have been attained or established. Beginnings of centuries have often had a quaint habit, like other children, of regarding their immediate elders as removed from them by almost impassable gulfs. But the fact remains that every person who is still middle-aged, besides those who are no longer so, was an actual contemporary of Thackeray, and that while the general atmosphere, say of "My Novel" itself, has an indefin

able but distinctly perceptible oldworldness about it, large passages of "The Newcomes" might, with the slightest change of mere "furniture" in slang, etc., have been written to-day. It must take another generation or two before men can-at least before most of them can-take even such a comparatively achromatic estimate as they can take (and this is by no means quite "dry-lighted") of Scott or Miss Austen, much less such a one as can be taken of Fielding; least of all such as can be taken of Milton or of Shakespeare.

Nor will even Time himself always settle matters. Even now, it is not so very uncommon to hear the young ass strain his innocent lungs in braying against Scott, against Miss Austen, against Fielding, against Milton, against even Shakespeare; and it is said, possibly with truth, that the reading of all classics, old and new, is less than ever practised, either in the choked and piecemeal education of youth, or amid the idle racket of business and pleasure in later years. We see indeed continual returns of engouement of accidental or engineered fancy for this and that writer not of the present day. But they seldom last; and one does not even know that it is very desirable that they should. For all fashions are, as fashions, bad: though taken together, and as parts or symptoms of the endless revolution of the unchanging human mind, they are almost always tolerable and sometimes relatively good. Besides, Thackeray, though he may be made the object of such engouement, is singularly ill suited for it. I have actually heard defenders of his use arguments which reminded me of that famous minister who asked, "D'ye think Powl knew Greek?" and I fancy the expression on the countenances of the apostle and the novelist, if they heard the respective utterances, must have been

not dissimilar. No: for the majority, Thackeray never was a "greatest living novelist," and, for the majority, he never will be a greatest dead one. I should even doubt whether he will ever seem one of the very greatest to any but a comparatively small minority.

To that minority-which perhaps, despite its comparative smallness, has never been and never will be contemptible he has always seemed and will always seem of the very greatest, and perhaps to some of its members the very greatest of all. But before coming to the reasons of their appreciation, it will be fair to give those of the commoner depreciation. The extreme inequalities of his production—the painful wanderings in the wilderness before the Promised Land was reached— have been admitted; and though in the novice-work there were almost everywhere premonitions of the craftsmastery-though Canaan itself is always in sight from the upper places of the desert-you cannot expect the average reader to be content with, or even to perceive, this. But even the masterpieces themselves are not provided with many strictly popular qualities. A regular plot may seem to some of us a rather idle thing, within the reach of a pretty mean intellect, and hardly capable of giving satisfaction, save of the most banal kind, to an accomplished taste. But there are of course others who attach the highest critical importance to it, and a much larger number who, without any definitely critical views, think there ought to be something of the kind. Thackeray neither would, nor, I think, could, give anything of the sort. Life very rarely, if ever, gives these regular plots; and Thackeray followed Life as the sunflower follows the sun. As a matter of direct consequence, he would not or could not give very intricate plots, regular or irregular, and though these are insucculent to not a few palates, and