[To THE EDITOR OP TEE " SPECTATOR."] SIR, —It is satisfactory
to admirers of Thackeray to find that they can emerge from the " Steele or Congreve " controversy- with their faith in the author of " Esmond " still unshaken.. Does not he make Mr. St. John chaff Mrs. Steele about the- Taller and " her " portrait in the forty-ninth number, quoting the whole passage that ends with the words, "to love her is a liberal education P"—words which Mr. Swinburne, in an un- conscious adaptation from Thackeray, so justly describes as the finest compliment ever paid to woman.
Unquestionably, as Mr. Justin McCarthy points out, the- forty-ninth Taller, in which those words occur, was written by Steele,—who would, by the way, surely have resented the im- putation of " contrasting " his Aspasia with " the giggling Leucippe." Whether Congreve did or did not write the forty- second number, in which the same Aspasia is spoken of as the illustrious pattern of all praiseworthy things," is a matter-
more open to doubt.—I am, Sir, &c., C. M, B.
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