But Ivanhoe found her of course, and makes her Mrs.Ivanhoe, or Lady Wilfrid the second.

Then Thackeray tells us how for many years he, Thackeray, had not ceased to feel that it ought to be so.

"Indeed I have thought of it any time these five-and-twenty years,--ever since, as a boy at school, I commenced the noble study of novels,--ever since the day when, lying on sunny slopes, of half-holidays, the fair chivalrous figures and beautiful shapes of knights and ladies were visible to me, ever since I grew to love Rebecca, that sweetest creature of the poet's fancy, and longed to see her righted." And so, no doubt, it had been.

The very burlesque had grown from the way in which his young imagination had been moved by Scott's romance.

He had felt from the time of those happy half-holidays in which he had been lucky enough to get hold of the novel, that according to all laws of poetic justice, Rebecca, as being the more beautiful and the more interesting of the heroines, was entitled to the possession of the hero.
We have all of us felt the same.