For this story, as well as the rest, is a burlesque on our dear old favourite Ivanhoe.
That everything goes right at last, that the wife comes back from her monastery, and joins her jealous husband, and that the duke's daughter has always, in truth, known that the poor archer was a noble knight,--these things are all matters of course.
But the best of the three burlesques is _Rebecca and Rowena, or A Romance upon Romance_, which I need not tell my readers is a continuation of _Ivanhoe_.

Of this burlesque it is the peculiar characteristic that, while it has been written to ridicule the persons and the incidents of that perhaps the most favourite novel in the English language, it has been so written that it would not have offended the author had he lived to read it, nor does it disgust or annoy those who most love the original.

There is not a word in it having an intention to belittle Scott.

It has sprung from the genuine humour created in Thackeray's mind by his aspect of the romantic.

We remember how reticent, how dignified was Rowena,--how cold we perhaps thought her, whether there was so little of that billing and cooing, that kissing and squeezing, between her and Ivanhoe which we used to think necessary to lovers' blisses.