his mother admiring a sunset might have come out of a book of fashions of that remote period.  It was in his initial letters and slight designs that Thackeray showed his best powers.  There is much wistful tenderness in the little Marquise’s face as she trips down a rope-ladder in an initial letter of Vanity Fair.  The bewigged shepherds and powdered shepherdesses of his favourite period are always reproduced with grace, and the children of his drawings are almost invariably charming.  In the darker moods, when “man delighted him not, nor woman either,” children did not fail to please him, and he sketched them in a hundred pathetic attitudes.  There are the little brother and sister of the doomed House of Gaunt, sitting under the ancestral sword that seems ready to fall.  There is little Rawdon Crawley, manly and stout, in his great coat, watching the thin little cousin Pitt, whom he was “too big a dog to play with.”  There is the printer’s devil, asleep at Pen’s door; and the small boy in “Dr. Birch,” singing in his nightgown to the big boy in bed.  There is Betsinda dancing with her plum-bun in “The Rose and the Ring.”  The burlesque drawings of that delightful child’s book are not its least attraction.  Not arriving at the prettiness of Mr. Tenniel, and the elegance of Mr. Du Maurier, and falling far short of their ingenious fantasy, they are yet manly delineations of great adventures.  The count kicking the two black men into space is a powerful design, full of action; and it would be hard to beat the picture of the fate of Gruffanuf’s husband.  These and the rest are old friends, and there are hosts of quaint scribblings, signed with the mark of a pair of spectacles, scattered through the pages of Punch.

GOLF.

While pheasant-shooters are enjoying the first day of the season, the votaries of a sport not less noble, though less noisy, are holding the great festival of their year.  The autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews is in full swing, and the words will suggest pleasant memories to many a golfer.  Golf is not one of the more brilliant and famous pastimes of the day, though it yields to none in antiquity and in unassuming merit.  The names of the winners of the gold medal and of the silver cross are not telegraphed all over the world as widely as Mr. Tennyson’s hero wished the news that Maud had accepted him to be.  The red man may possibly “dance beneath his red cedar tree” at the tidings of the event of one of our great horse-races, or great university matches.  At all events, even if the red man preserves his usual stoicism of demeanour, his neighbours, the pale-faces, like to know all about the result of many English sports the moment they are decided.  Golf, as we have said, excites less general enthusiasm; but in people who love it at all, the love is burning, consuming; they will talk golf-shop in season and