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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Mrs. Edwin Grabhom 
 
 y 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/bestofallgoodcomOOjerrrich 
 

 SERIES OF DMY COMPANIONS. 
 
 JieBestofBlKioodGolanii 
 
BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY ADVERTISER. 
 
 The best OF ALL GOOD COMPANY: 
 
 A SERIES OF DAILY COMPANIONS 
 
 FOR THE POCKET AND THE PORTMANTEAU, ASHORE AND AFLOAT, IN 
 TOWN AND OUT OF TOWN, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 
 
 Edited by BLANCHARD JERROLD. 
 
 PRICE ONE SHILLING EACH. 
 
 No. I. 
 
 A DAY WITH CHARLES DICKENS. 
 
 Includes Facsimile of a MS. Letter to Blanchard J err old. 
 
 No. II. 
 
 A DAY WITH SIR WALTER SCOTT. 
 
 No. III. 
 
 A DAY WITH LORD LYTTON. 
 
 Includes a Facsimile Page of his MS. of** King Arthur." 
 
 No. IV. 
 
 A DAY WITH DISRAELI. 
 
 Includes two Facsimile pagesofhis MS. of ''^ Lothair^^ given by the Right 
 Hon. Gentleman to the Editor. 
 
 No. V. 
 
 A DAY WITH THACKERAY. 
 
 Includes Facsimile of Ex^tract from MS. Letter. 
 
 IN PREPARATION :— 
 
 A Day with Douglas Jerrold. 
 
 A Day with Macaulay. 
 
 A Day with Lord Brougham. 
 
 A Day with Milton. 
 
 A Day with Thomas Hood. 
 
 A Day with Pepys. 
 
 A Day with L. E. L. 
 
 A Day with the Brownings. 
 A Day with Leigh Hunt. 
 A Day with Michael Faraday. 
 A Day with Archbishop Whately. 
 A Day with Anthony Trollope. 
 A Day with Dr. Johnson. 
 
 AND OTHERS; ALL OF 
 
 "THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY," 
 
 LONDON : 
 HOULSTON & SONS, PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.G.; 
 
 AND ALL booksellers. 
 
^a> 
 
 t ^ /^<.^.J^^^Cz^Ui^ 
 
 Si/ttu. (hAJUtA V^AH^ KxljCaa^jlL Skjuu A (tHjtu^ UT UamIol 
 
THE 
 
 BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY, 
 
 BLAN CHARD JERROLD. 
 
 A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 
 
 •' And there came up a lion out of Judah ! " — 
 Charlotte Bronte^ s exclamation on first seeing Thackeray's Portrait. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 HOULSTONAND SONS, 
 
 PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.G. 
 
 1872. 
 
±Kj iOilt^ 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 ^1, 4ND W, RIDKB PEINTERS, 
 
 DARTHOI.OMPW CLOSE, 
 
W. M. THACKERAY. 
 
 "and see the great ACHILLES WHOM WE KNEW." 
 
 Who that has seen will ever forget the commanding figure and the 
 stately head ? Sauntering — usually a solitary man — through the hall of 
 the Reform Club, or in the quietudes of the Athenasum, making up his 
 mind to find a corner to work for an hour or so on the small sheets of 
 paper in his pocket, in a hand as neat as Peter Cunningham's or Leigh 
 Hunt's ;* gazing dreamily, and often with a sad and weary look, out of 
 window ; moving slowly westward home to dinner on a summer's 
 evening ; or making a strange presence, as obviously not belonging to 
 the place, in Fleet Street on his way to Whitefriars or Cornhill ; who 
 that knew him does not remember dear Old Thackeray, as his familiars 
 lovingly called him, in some or all of these moods and places ? In 
 Thackeray, as in Dickens, there was a strong and impressive in- 
 dividuality. No two men could be less alike, in person or mind, than 
 these two writers who shared the world's favour together ; and yet there 
 was an equahty and identity in their impressiveness. Dickens' strength 
 was quick, alert, and with the glow of health in it ; it seemed to proceed 
 like that of a mighty engine from an inward fire. Thackeray's was 
 calm, majestic by its ease and extent, as the force of a splendid stream. 
 Hawthorne's figure and air has been described as " modestly grand "; 
 and the observation, it occurs to me, applies exactly to Thackeray. 
 Indeed, I have often been struck with the idea that the two men must 
 have affected society much in the same way, and by the same mental and 
 physical qualities. Like Hawthorne, Thackeray 
 
 " Wandered lonely as a cloud," 
 
 — a cloud, it should be noted and remembered, with a silver lining. In 
 their soUtude, when suddenly observed, both had a sad, a grave 
 
 * Shortl y before his death he spent a morning in the reading-room of the British 
 Museum, and there by accident left upon a table a page of the MS. of the story 
 he had in hand. The paper being found, the clearness and roundness of the writ- 
 ing at once suggested the owner to the attendant, and the precious missing leaf 
 was forwarded to Kensington. 
 
 V 
 
3i6 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 aspect; and each was " marvellously moved to fun "on occasions. In 
 both the boy appeared easily; and this was a quality of Dickens' genius, 
 as it was of my father's. I should like to see pictures of Thackeray 
 holding a skein of silk for a child upon his broad hands ; of Dickens 
 playing at leap-frog or rounders ; of Hawthorne lying in the grass 
 listening to the birds, and ducking lest the passers by should interrupt 
 him ; and of Douglas Jerrold taking part in basting the bear in his 
 Kentish orchard. Mr. Field's description of Hawthorne's fun at sea, and 
 of his grand solitary figure under the stars at night, might stand for 
 portraiture of Thackeray. 
 
 "That is his face, looking out upon us, next to Pope's," says Mr. Field, 
 in his " Yesterdays with Authors." " What a contrast in bodily appearance 
 those two EngUsh men of genius present ! Thackeray's great, burly figure, 
 broad-chested and ample as the day, seems to overshadow and quite blot 
 out of existence the author of ' The Essay on Man.' But what friends 
 they would have been had they lived as contemporaries under Queen 
 Anne or Queen Victoria ! One can imagine the author of * Pendennis ' 
 gently lifting poor little Alexander out of his ' chariot ' into the club, and 
 revelling in talk with him all night long. Pope's high-bred and gentle- 
 manly manner, combined with his extraordinary sensibility and dread 
 of ridicule, would have modified Thackeray's usual gigantic form and 
 sometimes boisterous sarcasm into a rich and strange adaptability to his 
 little guest. We can imagine them talking together now, with even a 
 nobler wisdom and ampler charity than were ever vouchsafed to them 
 when they were busy amid the turmoils of their crowded hterary Hves." 
 
 What Thackeray would have been had he lived the contemporary of 
 Pope, is a speculation much lower in interest than any description of 
 Thackeray as he lived and breathed and had his being— one of the lights 
 and glories of the Victorian epoch. Mr. Hannay's portrait is worth any 
 number or kind of poetic speculations : " In private this great 
 satirist, whose aspect in a crowd was often one of austere politeness and 
 reserve, unbent into a familiar naivetl, which somehow one seldom finds 
 in the demonstratively genial. And this was the more charming and 
 precious that it rested on a basis of severe and profound reflection, before 
 the glance of which all that was dark and serious in man's life and 
 prospects lay open. The gravity of that white head, with its noble brow 
 and thoughtful face full of feeling and meaning, enhanced the piquancy 
 of his playfulness, and of the little personal revelations which came with 
 such a grace from the depths of his kindly nature. When we con- 
 gratulated him, many years ago, on the touch in Vanity Fair, in which 
 Becky * admires ' her husband* when he is giving Lord Steyne the 
 chastisement which ruins her for life, * Well,' he said, ' when I wrote 
 the sentence, I slapped my fist on the table, and said ' t/iat is a touch of 
 genius.* The incident is a trifle, but it will reveal, we suspect, an 
 element of fervour, as well as a heartiness of frankness in recording the 
 fervour, both equally at variance with the vulgar conception of him. 
 This frankness and donkomie made him delightful in a tHe-a-tUe, and 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 317 
 
 gave a pleasant human flavour to talk full of sense, and wisdom and 
 experience, and lighted up by the gaiety of the true man of the 
 world." If Thackeray cast upon the outer world an austere — almost 
 contemptuous look — and walked the streets and paced the clubs self- 
 contained, solitary, — it was because he was an observer of human nature, 
 indeed of all nature. You stand away to examine a picture. He who 
 goes to observe the Downs on a Derby day does not take three sticks 
 at Aunt Sally. When Thackeray observed 'a child at play, he was 
 touched by the natural flow of its movements and the natural philosophy 
 underlying its prattle. Dickens put himself under the glossy plumes of the 
 raven in the happy family, and dwelt unctuously on the juiciness of the 
 youngster's exposed calves. The difference, I have thought, having often 
 come upon both at busy points of observation, was shown in their 
 attitude towards the world when in the thick of it. Thackeray sailed 
 majestically along, one hand thrust in his pocket, a cultivated, fastidious, 
 high-bred man, deep-hearted withal. Dickens had a swifter headway, a 
 more combative and a compacter air, and bore down with his bright eye 
 that had (to use Dore's phrase to me applied to his own retentive vision) 
 plenty of collodion in it, upon every human countenance, every beggar's 
 limp, or groundling's daub of dirt. Brave and loyal workers both, who have 
 laid the world under immeasurable debts of gratitude to them ; they held 
 along opposite sides of the way, and at each passing man and woman 
 gazed, albeit they knew them not, feeling that there were no ordinary men 
 abroad that day. 
 
 It was with Thackeray as with Hawthorne. The grand, sad mask 
 could pucker in a moment, and break into hearty fun and laughter. A 
 friend went laughing into the Reform Club one afternoon ; he had just 
 met Thackeray at the door of the Athenaeum Club. He had had a 
 dispute with his cabman about the fare, which he had just proposed to 
 settle by a toss. If Thackeray won, the cabman was to receive two 
 shillings, and if the toss went against the author of " Vanity Fair " the 
 cabman was to receive one shilling. Fortune was with the novelist ; 
 and he dwelt delightfully afterwards on the gentlemanly manner in which 
 the driver took his defeat.* Yet there were times, and many, when 
 
 * Thackeray's playfulness was a marked peculiarity ; a great deal of the time 
 he seemed like a schoolboy just released from a task. In the midst of the most 
 serious topic under discussion he was fond of asking pennission to sing a comic 
 song, or he would beg to be allowed to enliven the occasion by the instant introduc- 
 tion of a brief double-shuffle. Barry Cornwall told me that when he and ("harlcs 
 Lamb were once making up a dinner party together, Charles asked him not to in- 
 vite a certain lugubrious friend of theirs, * Because ' said Lamb, * he would cast a 
 damper even over a funeral ! ' I have often contrasted the habitual qualities of that 
 gloomy friend of theirs, with the astounding spirits of both Thackeray and Dickens. 
 They always seemed to me to be standing in the sunshine, and to be constantly 
 warning other people out of the cloudland. During Thackeray's first visit to America 
 his jollity knew no bounds, and it became necessary often to repress him when he 
 was walking in the street. I well remember his uproarious shouting and danc- 
 
3i8 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 Thackeray could not break through his outward austerity, even when 
 passing an intimate friend in the street. I and a mutual friend met him 
 one afternoon in Fleet Street, ambling to Whitefriars on his cob, and a 
 very extraordinary figure he made. He caught sight of us, and my com- 
 panion was about to grasp his hand, but he just touched his hat with his 
 finger, and without opening his lips or relaxing the solemn cast of his 
 features, he passed on. My companion stamped his foot upon the 
 pavement and cried, " Who would think that we were up till four o'clock 
 this morning together, and that he sang his * Reverend Dr. Luther,' and 
 was the liveliest of us," 
 
 But Thackeray was a sick man, as well as a hard-worked one. He was 
 threatened by several disorders of long continuance ; and against which 
 he stoutly fought , turning his noble placid face bravely upon the world 
 — this " great Achilles whom we knew," and who was most loved by those 
 who knew him best. Indeed by the outer world — by those with whom 
 he came in contact for the first time — he was not loved, and not often 
 liked. His address was as polished as a steel mirror, and as cold. In the 
 Hoggarty Diamond, in that exquisite chapter given to Mr. Titmarsh's 
 drive with Lady Drum, Mr. Samuel observes : — " For though I am 
 but a poor fellow, and hear people cry out how vulgar it is to eat 
 peas with a knife, or ask three times for cheese, and such like points of 
 ceremony, there's something, I think, much more vulgar than all this, 
 and that is insolence to one's inferiors. I hate the chap that uses it, as 
 I scorn him of humble rank that affects to be of the fashion ; and so I 
 determined to let Mr. Preston know a piece of my mind." And Mr. Pres- 
 ton knew it accordingly. In this passage there is the keynote of the 
 worldly side of Thackeray's character. He was beloved by his inferiors, 
 and reserved his hottest scorn for those pretenders who, buffeted and 
 cold-shouldered by those in whose society they aspire to mix, take their 
 revenge upon their dependants. Thackeray was most deeply touched by 
 any kindness or grace shown to him by one beneath him ; and perhaps 
 this honourable feeling (possible only in a cultivated being) is best shown 
 in his whimsical dedication of the " Paris Sketch Book " to his tailor, 
 M. Aretz. 
 
 " Sir," he said "■ it becomes every man in his station to acknowledge and 
 praise virtue wherever he may find it, and to point it out for the admira- 
 tion and example of his fellow-men. Some months since, when you pre- 
 sented to the writer of these pages a small account for coats and panta- 
 loons manufactured by you, and when you were met by a statement from 
 your creditor that an immediate settlement of your bill would be extremely 
 inconvenient to him, your reply was, ' Mon Dieu^ Sir, let not that annoy 
 you ; if you want money, as a gentleman often does in a strange country, 
 
 ing when he was told that the tickets to his first course of readings Avere all sold, 
 and when we rode together from his hotel to the Lecture-hall he insisted in thrust- 
 ing both his long legs out of the carriage window, in deference, as he said, to his 
 magnanimous ticket holders." — Yesterdays %vith Authors. 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 319 
 
 I have a thousand-franc note at my house which is quite at your service.' 
 History or experience, Sir, makes us acquainted with so few actions that 
 can be compared to yours — an offer like this from a stranger and a tailor 
 seems to me so astonishing — that you must pardon me for thus making 
 your virtue public, and acquainting the English nation with your merit 
 and your name. Let me add, Sir, that you live on the first-floor ; that 
 your clothes and fit are excellent ; and your charges moderate and just ; 
 and as a humble tribute of my admiration, permit me to lay these volumes 
 at your feet." 
 
 And so, in his most gracious moods, — gentle to the weak and lowly, 
 beloved of women and children,* but grand and stern and silent, a 
 mighty form crowned with a massive snow-haired head, — 
 *' See the great Achilles whom we knew." 
 
 TESTIMONIALS. 
 
 No better idea can be given of the generosity that lay deep in 
 Thackeray's character, than is obtainable from his many handsome allu- 
 sions to his literary contemporaries — and to Dickens, his twin star. He 
 and Dickens were never close friends, in the sense in which Dickens and 
 Maclise, or Mr. John Forster, or Stanfield, or Douglas Jerrold were. 
 They quarrelled, moreover ; but the author of " Vanity Fair " never for 
 a day swerved in his chivalrous allegiance to the author of the " Christ- 
 mas Carol," from that morning iii 1836 when he waited on Boz to beg per- 
 mission to illustrate one of his works. Become famous, a small man would 
 have kept the fact in the background (for Michael Angelo Titmarsh was 
 unsuccessful) ; but Thackeray told the story whimsically, years after 
 when he was great man enough to be a leading guest at a Royal Academy 
 anniversary dinner. 
 
 " I can remember when Dickens was a very young man, and had com- 
 menced delighting the world with some charming humorous works in 
 covers, which were coloured light green and came out once a month, 
 that this young man wanted an artist to illustrate his writings ; and I 
 recollect walking up to his chambers in Furnival's Inn with two or three 
 drawings in my hand, which, strange to say, he did not find suitable. But 
 for the unfortunate blight which came over my artistical existence, it 
 
 * During a small party at Horace Mayhew's, at which Thackeray had been in 
 one of his heartiest, kindliest, and at the same time most whimsical moods, a 
 young lady crept to the side of the host, and was unable to say less, by way of 
 expressing her enthusiasm for the lion of the evening, than, "I should so like to 
 kiss him." The host spoke to Thackeray : whereupon the great man advanced 
 to the blushing damsel and treating her like a pet child, lifted her from the 
 ground and kissed her forehead . It was one of the prettiest scenes imaginable. 
 
320 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 would have been my pride and my pleasure to have endeavoured one day 
 to find a place on these walls for one of my performances." This was on 
 the death of Seymour, while " Pickwick " was appearing ; and Thackeray 
 used to refer to Dickens' rejection of his offer as " Mr. Pickwick's lucky 
 escape." But he bore no grudge, albeit his climbing to a place by Dickens' 
 side was slow and difficult. Only a few years after, he paid a glowing 
 tribute of his praise to " Oliver Twist " and " Pickwick." He even went 
 out of his way, when reviewing the Royal Academy Exhibition a few years 
 later, to glorify the Boz personally. " Here," he told the public, " we have 
 the real identical man Dickens ; the artist must have understood the in- 
 ward Boz as well as the outward before he made this admirable repre- 
 sentation of him. What cheerful intelligence there is about the man's eye 
 and large forehead. The mouth is too large and full, too eager and active 
 perhaps (Thackeray would naturally think so) ; the smile is very sweet 
 •and generous. If Monsieur de Balzac, that voluminous physiognomist, 
 could examine this head he would no doubt interpret every line and wrinkle 
 in it ; the nose firm and well placed, the nostrils wide and full, as are the 
 nostrils of all men of genius (this is Monsieur Balzac's maxim). The past 
 and the future, says Jean Paul are written in every countenance. I think 
 we may promise ourselves a brilliant future from this one. There seems 
 no flagging as yet in it, no sense of fatigue, or consciousness of decaying 
 power. Long mayest thou, O Boz ! reign over thy comic kingdom ; long 
 may we pay tribute, whether of threepence weekly, or of a shilling monthly, 
 it matters not." But Thackeray's tribute on receipt of the Christmas 
 Carol is the brightest and most brilliant of his ungrudging tributes to his 
 illustrious friend and rival. " It is," says Thackeray, " the work of the 
 master of all the Enghsh humourists now alive ; the young man who came 
 and took his place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept 
 it." Farther on : " It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man 
 or woman who reads it a personal kindness. The last two people I heard 
 speak of it were women ; neither knew the other, or the author, and both 
 said by way of criticism, ' God bless him ! ' " It was never given to 
 Thackeray to touch the hearts of men and women and children Hke this : 
 and he seemed to admit it when in one of his lectures he told the audience 
 how one of his little girls had said to him that they liked one of the 
 Dickens' books better than his. But did he grudge the praise on this 
 account ? No. His answer is, " ' God bless him ! ' What a feeling is 
 this for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap." On 
 another occasion he said he was grateful " for the innocent laughter and 
 the sweet and unsullied pages which the author of ' David Copperfield ' 
 gave his children." It is related that Mr. Dickens (who was present) 
 looked immensely hard at the ceiling ; but by that time he must have 
 been well accustomed to the generous rival's praise. 
 
 When on the 30th of December 1863, at Kensal Green, Charles Dickens 
 stood, with Robert Browning at his side, looking into the narrow bed of 
 his chivalrous friend ; some of the generous words must have rushed 
 through his brain, and his firm resolve must have " taken the van " to pay 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 321 
 
 back a little of the debt. I wish I could find, amid all the masses of print 
 which Dickens controlled in his lifetime some scrap or two of hearty 
 tribute to Thackeray ; if only for the pleasure of thinking that some 
 sunny streaks were drawn across the path of generous Thackeray by the 
 pen of Boz. 
 
 But the sketch, *'/« Mernoriam" that appeared a full month after the 
 venerable head had been laid in Kensal Green, is all I gather. It is 
 eloquent, fervent, straight from the heart. Its very strength and brilhancy 
 increase the reader's regret that it should never have fallen under 
 Thackeray's eyes ; for he would have gone away direct to Gad's Hill, and 
 have thrown himself upon Dickens' neck and cried like a child : as he 
 did when his daughter first made a successful appearance in print, in his 
 own magazine. 
 
 Dickens opens with an acknowledgment : " It has been desired by 
 some of the personal friends of the great English writer who established 
 this (the Conihill) Magazine^ that its brief record of his having been 
 stricken from among men should be written by the old comrade and 
 brother-in-arms who pens these lines, and of whom he often wrote him- 
 self, and always with the warmest generosity." They knew one another 
 through eight-and-twenty years ; and met last at the Athenaeum club, a 
 week before Thackeray died, when " he was very cheerful, and looked 
 very bright." Dickens says : " The long interval between these two 
 periods is marked in my remembrance of him by many occasions when 
 he was supremely humorous, when he was irresistibly extravagant, when 
 he was softened and serious, when he was charming with children. But 
 by none do I recall him more tenderly than by two or three that start out 
 of the crowd, when he unexpectedly presented himself in my room, an- 
 nouncing how that some passage in a certain book had made him cry 
 yesterday, and how that he had come to dinner, ' because he couldn't 
 help it,' and must talk such passage over. No one can ever have seen 
 him more genial, natural, cordial, fresh, and honestly impulsive, than I 
 have seen him at those times. No one can be surer than I, of the great- 
 ness and the goodness of the heart that then disclosed itself." 
 
 Out of this passage, let us hope, some English painter will some day 
 make a picture that will travel round the world. 
 
 "We had our differences of opinion. I thought that he too much 
 feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of under- 
 valuing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in trust. But, 
 when we fell upon these topics, it was never very gravely, and I have a 
 lively image of him in my mind, twisting both his hands in his hair, and 
 stamping about, laughing, to make an end of the discussion. 
 
 " When we were associated in remembrance of the late Mr. Douglas 
 Jerrold, he delivered a public lecture in London, in the course of which 
 he read his very best contribution to " Punch," describing the grown-up 
 cares of a poor family of young children. No one hearing him could 
 have doubted his natural gentleness, or his thoroughly unaffected manly 
 sympathy with the weak and lowly. He read the paper most patheti- 
 
322 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 cally, and with a simplicity of tenderness that certainly moved one of his 
 audience to tears. This was presently after his standing for Oxford, from 
 which place he had dispatched his agent to me, with a droll note (to 
 which he afterwards added a verbal postscript), urging me to ' come down 
 and make a speech, and tell them who he was, for he doubted whether 
 more than two of the electors had ever heard of him, and he thought there 
 might be as many as six or eight who had heard of me.' He introduced 
 the lecture just mentioned, with a reference to his late electioneering 
 failure, which was full of good sense, good spirits, and good humour. [It 
 was the lecture in which he thanked Mr. Dickens for the pure pleasure he 
 had given his children, as I have already described.] 
 
 " He had a particular delight in boys, and an excellent way with them. 
 I remember his once asking me with fantastic gravity, when he had been 
 to Eton where my eldest son then was, whether I felt as he did in 
 regard of never seeing a boy without wanting instantly to give him a 
 sovereign ? I thought of this when I looked down into his grave, after 
 he was laid there, for I looked down into it over the shoulder of a boy to 
 whom he had been kind. 
 
 " These are slight remembrances ; but it is to little familiar things sug- 
 gestive of the voice, look, manner, never, never more to be encountered 
 on this earth, that the mind first turns in a bereavement. And greater 
 things that are known of him, in the way of his warm affections, his quiet 
 endurance, his unselfish thoughtfulness for others, and his munificent 
 hand, may not be told. 
 
 " If, in the reckless vivacity of his youth his satirical pen had ever 
 gone astray or done amiss, he had caused it to prefer its own petition for 
 forgiveness, long before : 
 
 ** I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain ; 
 The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain ; 
 The idle word that he'd wish back again. 
 
 " In no pages should I take it upon myself at this time to discourse of 
 his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his subtle acquaint- 
 ance with the weakness of human nature, of his delightful playfulness as 
 an essayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of his mastery over the 
 English language. Least of all, in these pages, enriched by his brilliant 
 qualities from the first of the series, and beforehand accepted by the 
 public through the strength of his great name. 
 
 " But on the table before me there lies all that he had written of his 
 latest and last story. That it would be very sad to any one — that it is 
 inexpressibly so to a writer — in its evidences of matured designs never 
 to be accomplished, of intentions begun to be executed and destined 
 never to be completed, of careful preparation for long roads of thought 
 that he was never to traverse, and for shining goals that he was never 
 to reach, will be readily believed. The pain, however, that I have felt 
 in perusing it, has not been deeper than the conviction that he was in 
 the healthiest vigour of his powers when he wrought on this last labour. 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 323 
 
 In respect of earnest feeling, far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and 
 a certain loving picturesqueness blending the whole, I believe it to be 
 much the best of all his works. That he fully meant it to be so, that 
 he had become strongly attached to it, and that he bestowed great 
 pains upon it, I trace in almost every page. It contains one picture 
 which must have cost him extreme distress, and which is a master- 
 piece. There are two children in it, touched with a hand as loving 
 and tender as ever a father caressed his little child with. There is 
 some young love, as pure and innocent and pretty as the truth. And 
 it is very remarkable that, by reason of the singular construction of 
 the story, more than one main incident usually belonging to the end of 
 such a fiction is anticipated in the beginning, and thus there is an 
 approach to completeness in the fragment, as to the satisfaction of the 
 reader's mind concerning the most interesting persons, which could 
 hardly have been better attained if the writer's breaking-off had been 
 foreseen. 
 
 " The last line he wrote, and the last proof he corrected, are among 
 these papers through which I have so sorrowfully made my way. The 
 condition of the little pages of manuscript where Death stopped his hand, 
 shows that he had carried them about, and often taken them out of 
 his pocket here and there, for patient revision and interlineation. The 
 last words he corrected in print, were, ' And my heart throbbed with 
 an exquisite bliss.' God grant that on that Christmas Eve when he 
 laid his head back on his pillow and threw up his arms as he had been 
 wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done and 
 Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his 
 own heart so to throb, when he passed away to his Redeemer's rest ! 
 
 " He was found peacefully lying as above described, composed, un- 
 disturbed, and to all appearance asleep, on the twenty-fourth of December, 
 1863. He was only in his fifty-third year ; so young a man, that the 
 mother who blessed him in his first sleep, blessed him in his last." 
 
 Dickens mentions the fact that Thackeray was laid in the grave where 
 a third child " lost in her infancy, years ago " was at peace. At the time 
 of her death, he called on Laman Blanchard, and wept passionately over 
 his loss, and would not be consoled. And his friends said that in the 
 exquisitely tender death scene of Samuel Titmarsh's first-born, he poured 
 out the lament of his own fireside. 
 
 " The child lay there in its. wicker cradle, with its sweet fixed smile in 
 its face (I think the angels in heaven must have been glad to weleome 
 that pretty innocent smile) ; and it was only the next day, after my wife 
 had gone to lie down, and I sat keeping watch by it, that I remembered 
 the condition of its parents, and thought, I can't tell with what a pang, 
 that I had not money left to bury the little thing, and wept bitter tears of 
 despair. Now, at last, I thought I must apply to my poor mother, for 
 this was a sacred necessity ; and I took paper, and wrote her a letter at 
 the baby's side, and told her of our condition. But, thank Heaven, I 
 never sent the letter ; for as I went to the desk to get sealing-wax and 
 
324 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 seal that dismal letter, my eyes fell upon the diamond-pin, that I had 
 quite forgotten, and that lying in the drawer of the desk. 1 looked into 
 the bed-room, — my poor wife was asleep ; she had been watching for 
 three nights and days, and had fallen to sleep from sheer fatigue ; and I 
 ran out to a pawnbroker's with the diamond, and received seven guineas 
 for it, and coming back put the money into the landlady's hand, and told 
 her to get what was needful." 
 
 Thackeray's references to children are delightful in their tenderness. 
 He held the charity children at St. Paul's to be the grandest sight a man 
 could look upon in London ; and in this very same Hoggarty Diamond he 
 made the young couple living in Lamb's Conduit Street go to see and 
 pray with the Foundlings. " My little Mary used to make my breakfast 
 before I went to office of mornings ; and on Sundays we had a holiday, 
 and saw the dear little children eat their boiled beef and potatoes at the 
 Foundling, and heard the beautiful music : but, beautiful as it is, I think 
 the children were a more beautiful sight still, and the look of their inno- 
 cent happy faces was better than the best sermon." 
 
 His allusions to his own children, wherever they occur in his letters, are 
 delightful : and his anxiety to make some dollars, "not for himself, but 
 for the little girls at home," is recorded in many of his most charming 
 letters. Mr. Reed relates how he held his boy in hand, and took the 
 trouble to show him London ; and how he was at Euston Square to see 
 them off, with a present in his hand for the youngster. Hodder, in his 
 " Memories," gives an excellent testimony in point : — 
 
 " One morning I was making my way to 36, Onslow Square, at an 
 earlier hour than usual, when, to my great surprise, I met Mr. Thackeray 
 pacing up and down the footway in a state of great mental uneasiness. 
 It was so entirely contrary to his custom — at least as far as my experience 
 told me — to leave his house at so early an hour, and I was so much con- 
 cerned at seeing him in such depression, that I was naturally induced to 
 say that I hoped nothing very serious had happened to his household. 
 
 He answered, ' Poor Marochetti's child is dying.' Having said this, 
 tears came to his relief, and he speedily returned home. He was on 
 terms of close friendship with the Baron Marochetti (his next-door 
 neighbour), and he sympathized with that well-known sculptor in the 
 deep love he bore for his dying child. He was in a cheerless mood for 
 the remainder of the day, and in the course of his work reverted many 
 times to the calamity which he so deplored. 
 
 "Again, on the morning of his departure for America. — He was to 
 start by an early train, and when I arrived (for it had been previously 
 arranged that I should see him before he left) I found him in his study, 
 and his two daughters in the dining-room — all in a very tearful condition ; 
 and I do not think I am far wrong in saying that if ever man's strength 
 was overpowered by woman's weakness, it Avas upon this occasion, for 
 Mr. Thackeray could not look at his daughters without betraying a 
 moisture in his eyes, which he in vain strove to conceal. Nevertheless 
 he was enabled to attend to several money transactions which it was 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 325 
 
 necessary he should arrange before leaving ; and to give me certain 
 instructions about the four volumes of his ' Miscellanies' then in course 
 of publication, and which he begged me to watch in their passage 
 through the press, with a view to a few foot-notes that might, he thought, 
 be desirable. Then came the hour for parting. A cab was at the door, 
 the luggage had all been properly disposed of, and the servants stood in 
 the hall, to testify, by their looks, how much they regretted their master's 
 departure. * This is the moment I have dreaded ! ' said Thackeray, as 
 he entered the dining-room to embrace his daughters ; and when he 
 hastily descended the steps of the door he knew that they would be at 
 the window to — 
 
 * Cast one longing, lingering look behind. ' 
 
 * Good-bye,' he murmured, in a suppressed voice, as I followed him to 
 the cab; * keep close behind me, and let me try to jump in unseen.' The 
 instant the door of the vehicle was closed upon him, he threw himself 
 back into the corner and buried his face in his hands." 
 
 When Mr. James Hannay reprinted the brief memoir of Thackeray 
 which he wrote in the Inverness Courier at the time of his death, he ob- 
 served in a prefatory note : — 
 
 " There was nothing more charming about Thackeray, — and this too 
 receives illustration in what follows, — than the kindly footing on which 
 he stood with the younger generation. He was not a man to have a little 
 senate ; he held sycophants, and all who encouraged them, in contempt ; 
 his friends and acquaintances were of all varieties of class and character, 
 differed from him in their ways of thinking about everything. But 
 he made it a duty to befriend and cherish anybody in whose merit and 
 sincerity he believed, however casual the accident which had brought 
 them under his notice. These are the traits which endear his memory 
 to all who knew him, and which will pleasantly connect him henceforth 
 in their minds, with the best and greatest of the humourists and moralists 
 to whom he is now gathered." 
 
 Mr. William B. Reed,* one of Thackeray's intimate American friends, 
 wrote a tribute to his memory in 1864, in the " Darkest Hour of the Civil 
 War," that was published in Blackwood ra June, 1872. He says : " My 
 personal relations to him happened to become very intimate. He seemed 
 to take a fancy to me and mine, and I naturally loved him dearly. He 
 used to come to my house, not the abode of wealth or luxury, almost 
 every day, and often more than once a day. He talked with my little 
 children, and told them odd fairy tales ; and I now see him (this was on 
 his second visit) one day in Walnut-street walking slowly along with my 
 little girl by the hand — the tall, gray-haired, spectacled man with an effort 
 accommodating himself to the toddling child by his side ; and then he 
 would bring her home : and one day, when we were to have a great din- 
 
 * Mr. William B. Reed, of Philadelphia, United States Minister in China, in 
 Lord Elgin's time. 
 
326 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 ner at the club, given to him, and my wife was ill, and my household dis- 
 arranged, and the bell rang, and I said to him, ' I must go and carve the 
 boiled mutton for the children, and take for granted you do not care to 
 come ; ' and he got up, and with a cheery voice, said ' I love boiled mut- 
 ton and children too, I will dine with them,' and we did ; and he was 
 happy, and the children were happy, and our appetites for the club dinner 
 was damaged. Such was Thackeray in my home." . . . "I liked 
 him better at home and alone. It was on this occasion, or rather on 
 our return journey to Philadelphia, that, on board the steamboat (here 
 again am I localising), he spoke to me of domestic sorrows and anxieties 
 too sacred to be recorded here. And yet it was this man whom vulgar- 
 minded people call heartless ! As he thus talked to me I thought of lines 
 of tenderness often quoted, which no one but he could have written : — 
 
 * Ah me ! how quick the days are flitting ! 
 
 I mind me of a time that's gone, 
 When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting, 
 
 In this same place, but not alone ; 
 A fair young form was nestled near me, 
 
 A dear, dear face looked fondly up 
 And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me, — 
 
 There's no one now to share my cup.' 
 
 . . . He was too sincere a man to talk for effect, or to pay compli- 
 ments ; and on his first visit to America, he seemed so happy and pleased 
 with all he met, that I fancied he might be tempted to come and for a 
 time live among us." The British Consulate at Philadelphia became 
 vacant, the incumbent, Mr. William Peter, dying suddenly; and it seems 
 from the following note, written at Washington, that I urged him to take 
 the place if he could get it." Thackeray's answer is one of his most 
 charming letters. He acknowledged that there were half a dozen houses 
 in Philadelphia where he could find very pleasant friends and company ; 
 and that good old library would give him plenty of acquaintances more. 
 Then came the " BUTS " : 
 
 " But home among my parents here, and some few friends I have made 
 in the last twenty five years, and a tolerably fair prospect of an honest 
 livehhood on the familiar London flagstones, and the library at the 
 Athenseum, and the ride in the park, and the pleasant society afterwards ; 
 and a trip to Paris now and again, and to Switzerland and Italy in the 
 summer — these are little temptations which make me not discontented 
 with my lot, about which I grumble only for pastime, and because it is 
 an EngUshman's privilege. If it is death to part with these delights (and 
 pleasures they are, and no mistake), sure the mind can conceive others 
 afterwards ; and I know one small philosopher who is quite ready to give 
 up these pleasures ; quite content (after a pang or two of separation from 
 dear friends here) to put his hand into that -of the summoning angel, and 
 say, " Lead on, O messenger of God our Father! to the next place whither 
 the Divine goodness calls us." We must be bhndfolded before we can 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 327 
 
 pass, I know ; but I have no fear about what is to come, any more than 
 my children need fear that the love of their father should fail them. I 
 thought myself a dead man once, and protest the notion gave me no dis- 
 quiet about myself." 
 
 Testimonies of love, of friendship, of admiration, in records of kindly 
 acts, in anecdotes of tender heart, in passages from his works illustrating 
 passages of his life, filled the papers at that mournful Christmastime 
 when he died. The instances of his kindly and unostentatious help to 
 many of his young literary friends, might be given by the score. I 
 can remember many that came under my own observation. I was one 
 morning at Horace Mayhew's chambers in Regent Street when Thackeray 
 knocked at the door, and cried from without — " It's no use, Porry 
 Mayhew : open the door." 
 
 " It's dear old Thackeray," said Mayhew, instinctively putting chairs 
 and table in order to do honour to the friend of whom he never spoke 
 without pride, and without adding, — " I know dear good Thackeray is 
 very fond of me." 
 
 Thackeray came in, saying cheerily — " Well, young gentlemen, you'll 
 admit an old fogy." 
 
 He always spoke of himself as an old man. Between him and Mayhew 
 there were not many years. He took up the papers lying about, talked 
 the gossip of the day, and then suddenly said— with his hat in his hand— - 
 " I was going away without doing part of the business of my visit. You 
 spoke the other day at the dinner (the Punch weekly meeting) of poor 
 George. Somebody — most unaccountably— has returned me a five pound 
 note I lent him a long time ago. I didn't expect it : — so just hand it to 
 George : and tell him, when his pocket will bear it, just to pass it on to 
 some poor fellow of his acquaintance. By-bye." A nod and he was gone. 
 
 This was, we all agreed, very like " dear old Thackeray." • 
 
HIS LETTERS. 
 
 Thackeray was not a voluminous nor a studied correspondent : but he 
 was a most original one. His letters are a key to the kinder and livelier side 
 of his character. Sending the " Irish Sketch Book " to Laman Blanchard 
 (April 21, 1843) -the volumes lie under my eyes— he wrote in the cus- 
 tomary whimsical way : — 
 
 " Dear Blanchard, — Not knowing the number of your row — not 
 indeed certain whether it is Union Row or Place, I've sent by the Parcels 
 Company the book, all but the last sheet, to the Examiner, to be forwarded 
 to you. 
 
 " It is dedicated to Mr. Lever, and the author will say in the preface that 
 it was to have been called ' The Cockney in Ireland,' but for the pathetic 
 remonstrances of the publishers. 
 
 " And so Heaven speed it ! 
 
 " Ever yours, 
 
 "Amelia. 
 
 " I shall be in the Linden grove at the rising of the moon, and you will 
 know me by a cherry-coloured ribbon tied round the tail of my dog." 
 
 " Should any letters arrive," he wrote to Mr. Fields from Philadelphia, 
 " addressed to the care of J. T. F., for the ridiculous author of this, that, 
 and the other, F. is requested to send them to Mercantile Library, Balti- 
 more. My ghostly enemy will be delighted (or will gnash his teeth with 
 rage) to hear that the lectures in the capital of Pa. have been well attended. 
 No less than 750 people paid at the door on Friday night, and though 
 last night there was a storm of snow so furious that no reasonable mortal 
 could face it, 500 (at least) amiable maniacs were in the lecture-room, and 
 wept over the fate of the last king of these colonies." 
 
 Mr. Fields says : — 
 
 " Almost every day, while he was lecturing in America, he would send 
 off little notes exquisitely written in point of penmanship, and sometimes 
 embelhshed with characteristic pen-drawings. Having attended an ex- 
 temporaneous supper festival at ' Porter's,' he was never tired of ' going 
 again.'" Here is a scrap of paper, holding these few words, written in 
 1852 :- 
 
 " Nine o'Clock, p.m. Tremont. 
 
 " Arrangements have just been concluded for a meeting somewhere to- 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 329 
 
 night, which we much desire you should attend. Are you equal to two 
 nights running of good time ? " 
 
 Then follows a pen portrait of a friend of his with a cloven foot and a 
 devil's tail just visible under his cloak. Sometimes, to puzzle his corres- 
 pondent, he would write in so small a hand that the note could not be 
 read without the aid of a magnifying-glass. Caligraphy was to him one 
 of the fine arts, and he once told Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, that if ' 
 all trades failed he would earn sixpences by writing the Lord's Prayer and 
 the Creed (not the Athanasian) in the size of that coin. He greatly 
 delighted in rhyming and lisping notes and billets. Here is one of them, 
 dated from Baltimore, without signature : — 
 
 " Dear F — th ! The thanguinary fateth (I don't know what their anger 
 meanth) brought me your letter of the eighth, yethterday, only the fifteenth ! 
 What blunder cauthed by chill delay (the Doctor Johnthon'th noble verthe) 
 thuth kept my longing thoul away, from all that motht I love on earth ? 
 Thankth for the happy contenth !— thothe dithpatched to J. G. K. and 
 Thonth, and that thmall letter you inclothe from Parith, from my dearetht 
 oneth ! I pray each month may tho increathe my thmall account with 
 J. G. King, that all the thipth which croth the theath, good tidingth of my 
 girl may bring ! — that every blething fortune yieldeth, I altho pray may 
 come to path on Mithter and Mith J. T. F— th, and all good friendth in 
 Bothton, Math. ! " 
 
 While he was staying at the Clarendon Hotel, in New York, every 
 morning's mail brought a few lines, sometimes only one line, sometimes 
 only two words, from him, reporting progress. One day he tells me : 
 " Immense hawdience last night." Another day he says : " Our shares 
 look very much up this morning." On the 29th of November, 1852, he 
 writes : " I find I have a much bigger voice than I knew of, and am not 
 afraid of anybody." At another time he writes : " I make no doubt you 
 have seen that admirable paper, the New York Herald, and are aware of 
 the excellent reception my lectures are having in this city. It was a 
 lucky Friday when first I set foot in this country. I have nearly saved 
 the fifty dollars you lent me in Boston." In a letter from Savannah ' 
 dated the 19th of March, 1853, in answer to one I had written to him, 
 telling him that a charming epistle, which accompanied the gift of a silver 
 mug he had sent to me some time before, had been stolen from me, he 
 says : — 
 
 "My dear fellow, I remember I asked you in that letter to accept 
 a silver mug in token of our pleasant days together, and to drink a health 
 
 sometimes in it to a sincere friend Smith and Elder write 
 
 me word they have sent by a Cunard to Boston a packet of paper, 
 stamped, &c., in London. I want it to be taken from the Custom House, 
 
 dooties paid, &c., and dispatched to Miss , New York. Hold your 
 
 tongue, and don't laugh, you rogue. Why shouldn't she have her 
 paper, and I my pleasure, without your wicked, wicked sneers and 
 imperence ? I'm only a cipher in the young lady's estimation, and 
 why shouldn't I sigh for her if I like ? I hope I shall see you all at 
 
 z 
 
330 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 Boston before very long. I always consider Boston as my native place, 
 you know." 
 
 When Thackeray reached Philadelphia in the month of January, 1853 
 (his first visit), he became the household friend of Mr. William B. Reed, 
 formerly United States minister in China. Mr. Reed's "memorial" of 
 his Thackeray experiences are fully as delightful as those of Mr. Field's. 
 Returned to Europe, the author of the " Virginians " remained the cordial 
 correspondent of his American hosts, and turned often to them, in his 
 tender, humourous way. In the summer of 1853 he was on the Continent 
 with his daughters : and it was during their rambles, and his watching 
 by the children's sick bed, that he wrote " The Rose and the Ring ; " and 
 that he conceived the idea of " The Newcomes" — completed two years 
 later. " Two years ago," he explains in its conclusion, " walking with my 
 children in some pleasant fields near Berne, in Switzerland, I strayed 
 from them into a little wood ; and coming out of it presently told them 
 how the story had been revealed to me somehow, which for three-and- 
 twenty months the reader has been pleased to follow." From Switzerland 
 he wrote to his Philadelphia friend : — 
 
 " Neufchatel, Switzerland. 
 "y///r 21, 1853. 
 
 "My dear Reed, — Though I am rather slow in paying the tailor, I 
 always pay him, and as with tailors so with men ; I pay my debts to my 
 friends, only at rather a long day. Thank you for writing to me so kindly, 
 you who have so much to do. I have only begun to work ten days since, 
 and now, in consequence, have a little leisure Before, since my return 
 from the West, it was flying from London to Paris and vice versa, din- 
 ners right and left, parties every night. If I had been in Philadelphia I 
 could scarcely have been more feasted. Oh, you unhappy Reed ! I see 
 you (after that little supper with McMichael) on Sunday, at your own 
 table, when we had that good Sherry-Madeira, turning aside from the 
 wine-cup with your pale face ! That cup has gone down this well so 
 often (meaning my own private cavity), that I wonder the cup isn't broken, 
 and the well as well as it is. 
 
 " Three weeks of London were more than enough for me, and I feel as 
 if I had had enough of it and pleasure. Then I remained a month with 
 my parents ; then I brought my girls on a little pleasuring tour, and it 
 has really been a pleasuring tour. We spent ten days at Baden, when I 
 set intrepidly to work again ; and have been five days in Switzerland 
 and now not bent on going up mountains but taking things easily. How 
 beautiful it is ! How pleasant ! How great and affable, too, the land- 
 scape is ! It is delightful to be in the midst of such scenes — the ideas get 
 generous reflections from them. I don't mean to say my thoughts grow 
 mountainous and enormous hke the Alpine chain yonder ; but, in fine, it 
 is good to be in the presence of this noble nature. It is keeping good 
 company ; keeping away mean thoughts. I see in the papers now and 
 again accounts of fine parties in London, Bon. Dieu / is it possible any 
 one ever wanted to go to fine London parties, and are there now people 
 
A DAY WITU W. M. THACKERAY. 33! 
 
 sweating in Mayfair routs? The European continent swarms with your 
 people. They are not all as polished as Chesterfield. 1 wish some of 
 them them spoke French a little better. 1 saw five of them at supper 
 at Basle the other night with their knives down their throats. It was 
 awful ! My daughter saw it, and I was obliged to say, " My dear, your 
 great great grandmother, one of the finest ladies of the old school I ever 
 saw, always applied cold steel to her wittles. It's no crime to eat with a 
 knife, which is all very well, but I wish five of 'em at a time wouldn't. 
 
 " Will you please beg JMcMichael, when Mrs. Glyn, the English tragic 
 actress, comes to read Shakespeare in your city, to call on her, do the 
 act of kindness to her, and help her with his valuable editorial aid ? I 
 wish we were to have another night soon, and that I was going this very 
 evening to set you up with a headache to morrow morning. By Jove ! 
 how kind you all were to me J How I like your people and want to see 
 'em again 1 You are more tender-hearted, romantic, sentimental, than 
 we are. I keep on telling this to our fine people here, and have so bela- 
 boured your [here the paper was turned •and revealed the sketch. At the 
 top is written, " Pardon this rubbishing picture ; but I didn't see, and 
 can't afford to write page three over again,"] country with praise in private 
 that I sometimes think I go too far. I keep back some of the truth, but 
 the great point to try and ding into the ears of the great, stupid, virtue- 
 proud English public is, that there are folks as good as they in America. 
 That's where Mrs. Stowe's book has done harm, by inflaming us with 
 an idea of our own superior virtue in freeing our blacks, whereas you 
 keep yours. Comparisons are always odorous, Mrs. Malaprop says. 
 
 " I am about a new story, but don't know as yet if it will be any good. 
 It seems to me I am too old for story-telling ; but I want money, and 
 shall get 20,000 dollars for this, of which (D.V.) I'll keep fifteen. I wish 
 this rubbish (the sketch) were away, I might have put written rubbish in 
 its stead. Not that I have anything to say, but that I always remem- 
 ber you and yours, and honest Mac and Wharton, and Lewis, and kind 
 fellows who have been kind to me, and 1 hope will be kind to me again. 
 Good-bye, my dear Reed, and believe me, ever sincerely yours, 
 
 "W. M. Thackeray." 
 
 Thackeray was very fond of the world, and of London parties neverthe- 
 less ; as indeed his works show. For the world— and chiefly the polite 
 world — was his particular oyster ; th^ food on which his wisdom, his 
 insight, his humour, and his natural, underlying pathos, fed by day ajnd 
 night. . ; ^ 
 
 The year 1854 was one of sorrow to his friend Reed. How manly, 
 and how full of Christian courage, is the humourist, become the consoler 
 and the adviser. 
 
 "Onslow Square, Brompton, 
 " November. 
 
 " My dear Reed, — I received your melancholy letter this morning. 
 It gives me an opportunity of writing about a subject on which, of course 
 
332 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 I felt very strongly for you and for your poor brother's family. I have kept 
 back writing, knowing the powerlessness of consolation, and having I don't 
 know what vague hopes that your brother and Miss Bronson might have 
 been spared. That ghastly struggle over, who would pity any man that de- 
 parts ? It is the survivors one commiserates of such a good, pious, tender- 
 hearted man as he seemed, whom God Almighty has just called back to 
 himself. He seemed to me to have all the sweet domestic virtues which 
 make the pang of parting only the more cruel to those who are left behind. 
 But that loss, what a gain to him ! A just man summoned by God, — for 
 what purpose can he go but to meet the divine love and goodness ? I 
 never think about deploring such ; and as you and I send for our children, 
 meaning the manly love and kindness, how much more Pater Noster.> 
 So we say, and weep the beloved ones whom we lose all the same with 
 the natural selfish sorrow ; as you, I dare say, will have a heavy heart- 
 when your daughter marries and leaves you. You will lose her, though 
 her new home is ever so happy. I remember quite well my visit to your 
 brother — the pictures in his room, which made me see what way his 
 thoughts lay ; his sweet, gentle, melancholy, pious manner. That day 1 
 saw him here in Dover Street, I don't know whether 1 told them, but 
 1 felt at the time that to hear their very accents affected me somehow. 
 They were just enough American to be national ; and where shall I ever 
 hear voices in the world that have spoken more kindly to me? It was 
 like being in your grave, calm, kind old Philadelphia over again ; and 
 behold ! now they are to be heard no more. I only saw your brother 
 once in London. When he first called I was abroad ill, and went to see 
 him immediately I got your letter, which he brought and kept back, 1 
 think. We talked about the tour which he had been making, and about 
 churches in this country — which I knew interested him — and Canterbury 
 especially, where he had been at the opening of a missionary college. 
 He was going to Scotland, I think, and to leave London instantly, for 
 
 he and Miss B refused hospitality, &c. ; and we talked about the 
 
 Memoir of Hester Reed, which 1 had found I didn't know how, on my 
 study-table, and about the people whom he had met at Lord Makon's— 
 and I believe I said 1 should like to be going with him in the Arctic. 
 And we parted with a great deal of kindness, please God, and friendly 
 talk of a iuture meeting. May it happen one day ! for I feel sure he 
 was a just man. I wanted to get a copy of ' Esmond ' to send by him 
 (the first edition, which is the good one) ; but I did not know where to 
 light upon one, having none myself, and a month since bought a couple 
 of copies at a circulating library for 7s. 6d. a-piece. 
 
 " I am to-day just out of bed after another, about the dozenth, severe 
 fit of spasms, which I have had this year. My book would have been 
 written but for them, and the lectures begun, with which 1 hope to make 
 a few thousand more dollars for those young ladies. But who knows 
 whether I shall be well enough to deliver them, or what is in store for 
 next year? The secretaryship of our legation at Washington was vacant 
 the other day, and 1 instantly asked for it, but in the very kindest letter 
 
A DAV WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 333 
 
 Lord Clarendon showed how the petition was impossible. First, the 
 
 place was given away ; next, it would not be fair to appoint out of the 
 
 service. But the first was an excellent reason, not a doubt of it. So if 
 
 ever I come, as I hope and trust to do this time next year, it must be at 
 
 my own cost, and not the Queen's. — Good-bye, my dear Reed, and 
 
 believe that I have the utmost sympathy in your misfortune, and am 
 
 most sincerely yours, 
 
 " W. M. Thackeray." 
 
 Thackeray's allusion to the treatment he received when he applied for 
 a post that in any other civilized country would have been pressed upon 
 the acceptance of so illustrious a citizen, is full of his customary modesty. 
 It will remain a notable fact— not to the credit of the Government of 
 which Lord Clarendon was a member — long after most of the members 
 of that Government shall have passed out of the memories of men. 
 Thackeray returned to America in the winter of 1855, with " The Georges." 
 Mr. Reed is in doubt whether it was to a passage on the death of 
 George IV., or to one about the Princess Amelia and the old king 
 praying for returiling reason, that Thackeray refers in the following : — 
 
 •' Baltimore, 
 
 '■'January 16, 1856. 
 
 " My dear Reed,— Your letter of the 9th, with one from Boston of 
 the 8th, was given to me last night when I came home. In what possible 
 snow-drift have they been lying torpid ? One hundred thanks for your 
 goodness in the lecture and all other matters ; and if I can find the face 
 to read those printed lectures over again, I'll remember your good advice. 
 That splendid crowd on the last lecture night I knew would make our 
 critical friend angry. I have not seen the last article, of course, and 
 don't intend to look for it. And as I was reading the George III. lecture 
 here on Monday night, I could, not help asking myself, ' What can the 
 man mean by saying that I am uncharitable, unkindly — that I sneer at 
 virtue,' and so forth ? My own conscience being pretty clear, I can 
 receive the Bulletin's displeasure with calmness — remembering how I 
 used to lay about me in my own youthful days, and how I generally took 
 a good tall mark to hit at. 
 
 " Wicked weather, and an opera company which performed on the 
 two first lecture nights here, made the audiences rather thin ; but they 
 fetched up at the third lecture, and to-night is the last ; after which I go 
 to Richmond, then to go further south, from Charleston to Havannah 
 and New Orleans ; perhaps to turn back and try westward, where I know 
 there is a great crop of dollars to be reaped. But to be snow-bound in 
 my infirm condition ! I might never get out of the snow alive. 
 
 " I go to Washington to-morrow for a night. I was there, and dined 
 with Crampton on Saturday. He was in good force and spirits, and I 
 saw no signs of packing-up or portmanteaus in the hall. 
 
 " I send my best regards to Mrs. Reed and your sister-in-law, and 
 Lewis and his kind folks, and to Mac's whiskey-punch, which gave me 
 
334 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 no headache. I'm very sorry it treated you so unkindly. Always yours, 
 dear Reed, 
 
 " W. M. Thackeray." 
 
 Mr. Reed explains the following letter in a passage of which it may be 
 observed that in all particulars the incident is " so like Thackeray." 
 ' ' The allusion in this letter to the printed lectures, recalls a little incident 
 which was very illustrative of his generous temper, and is not unlike 
 " the pill-box with the guineas," which I have seen lately in some literary 
 notices. It was this : On his return to Philadelphia, in the spring of 
 1856, from the south and west, a number of his friends — I as much as 
 any one -urged him, unwisely as it turned out, to repeat his lectures on 
 " The Humourists." He was very loth to do it, but finally yielded, 
 being, I doubt not, somewhat influenced by the pecuniary inducements 
 accidentally held out to him. A young bookseller of this city offered 
 him a round sum — not very large, but, under the circumstances, quite 
 liberal— for the course, which he accepted. The experiment was a 
 failure. It was late in the season, with long days and shortening nights, 
 and the course was a stale one, and the lectures had been printed, and 
 the audiences were thin, and the bargain was disastrous, not to him, but 
 to the young gentleman who had ventured it. We were all disappointed 
 and mortified ; but Thackeray took it good-humouredly : the only thing 
 that seemed to disturb him being his sympathy with the man of business. 
 " I don't mind the empty benches, but I cannot bear to see that sad- 
 faced young man as I come out, who is losing money on my account." 
 This he used to say at my house when he came home to a frugal and not 
 very cheerful supper after the lectures. Still the bargain had been 
 fairly made, and was honourably complied with ; and the money was 
 paid and remitted, through my agency, to him at York. I received no 
 acknowledgment of the remittance, and recollect well that I felt not a 
 little annoyed at this ; the more so, when, on picking up a newspaper, I 
 learned that Thackeray had sailed for home. The day after he had 
 gone, when there could be no refusal, I received a certificate of deposit 
 on his New York bankers for an amount quite sufficient to meet any loss 
 incurred, as he thought, on his behalf. I give the accompanying note, 
 merely suppressing the name of the gentleman in question. There are 
 some little things in his note — its blanks and dates — to which a fac- 
 simile alone would do justice : — 
 
 " April 24. 
 
 " My Dear Reed, — When you get this, . . . remummum-ember 
 me to kick — kick— kind ffu-fffu-ffriends ... a sudden resolution — 
 to — mummum-morrow ... in the Bu-bu-baltic. 
 
 " Good-bye, my dear kind friend, and all kind friends in Philadelphia. 
 I didn't think of going away when I left home ; but it's the best way. 
 
 " I think it best to send back 25 per cent, to poor . Will you 
 
 kindly give him the enclosed ; and depend on it I shall go and see 
 Mrs. Best when I go to London, and tell her all about you. My heart 
 is uncommonly heavy ; and 1 am yours, gratefully and affectionately, 
 
 "W. M. T." 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 33^ 
 
 And so he left America — never to return. But his friends from the 
 West were always welcome ; and when they announced their coming 
 they found him ready to prepare for, and receive, them. Mr. Peed tells 
 us, that on his appointment to China, Thackeray was among the first to 
 congratulate him, and to beg him to be his guest in London— en route. 
 
 "Maurigy's Hotel, i. Regent Street, Waterloo Place, 
 
 ''April 2, 1859. 
 " My Dear Reed, — This is the best place for you, I think. Two 
 bishops already in the house. Country gentlefolks and American envoys 
 especially affect it. Mr. Maurigy says you may come for a day at the 
 rate of some ten guineas a week, with rooms very clean and nice, which 
 I have just gone over, and go away at the day's end if you disapprove. 
 
 " This letter {referring to one enclosed) is about the Athenceiim, where 
 you may like to look in. I wrote to Lord Stanhope, who is on the com- 
 mittee, to put you up. 
 
 " I won't bore you by asking you to dinner till we see how matters are ; 
 as of course you will consort with bigger wigs than yours always, 
 
 "W. M. Thackeray." 
 
 Mr. Reed relates that no " bigger wigs " came between them ; and 
 that Thackeray was very kind and attentive to him during his stay. 
 " He came regularly to our quarters, went with me to the Athenaeum — ■ 
 that spot of brilliant association — where he pointed out the eminent men 
 of whom I had heard and read ; and then he would go to his working- 
 table in the club library and write for the Cornhill" 
 
 Thackeray's appearances in print as a letter-writer were few and far 
 between ; but they were all memorable, and to his honour I give two 
 admirable examples. First, of the dignity of literature. This letter 
 is an amplification of that to the editor of the Sun, the fac-simile of 
 which opens this " Day " : — 
 p 
 
 , "Reform Club, 
 
 "yan. Zth, 1850. 
 
 " To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle, 
 
 "Sir,— In a leading article of your journal of Thursday, the 3rd 
 instant, you commented upon literary pensions and the status of literaiy 
 men in this country, and illustrated your argument by extracts from 
 the story of ' Pendennis,' at present in course of publication. You have 
 received my writings with so much kindness that, if you have occasion to 
 disapprove of them or the author, I can't question your right to blame 
 me, or doubt for a moment the friendliness and honesty of my critic ; 
 and however I might dispute the justice of your verdict in my case, I 
 had proposed to submit to it in silence, being indeed very quiet in my 
 conscience with regard to the charge made against me. But another 
 newspaper of h'gh character and repute takes occasion to question the 
 
336 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 principles advocated in your article of Thursday ; arguing in favour of 
 pensions for literary persons as you argued against them ; and the only 
 point upon which the Examiner and the Chronicle appear to agree un- 
 luckily regards myself, who am offered up to general reprehension in two 
 leading articles by the two writers ; by the latter, for ' fostering a bane- 
 ful prejudice ' against literary men ; by the former, for ' stooping to 
 flatter' this prejudice in the public mind, and condescending to caricature 
 (as is too often my habit), my literary fellow-labourers, in order to pay 
 court to 'the non-literary class.' The charges of the Examiner against 
 a man who has never, to his knowledge, been ashamed of his profession, 
 or (except for its dulness) of any single line from his pen — grave as they 
 are, I hope, not proven. * To stoop to flatter ' any class is a novel accu- 
 sation brought against my writings; and as for my scheme 'to pay 
 court to the non-literary class by disparaging my literary fellow-labourers, 
 it is a design which would exhibit a degree not only of business, but of 
 folly upon my part, of which I trust I am not capable. The editor of 
 the Examiner may, perhaps, occasionally write, like other authors, in a 
 hurry, and not be aware of the conclusions to which some of his sen- 
 tences may lead. If I stoop to flatter everybody's prejudice for some 
 interested motives of my own, I am no more nor less than a rogue and a 
 cheat, which deductions from the Examiner'' s premises I will not stoop 
 to contradict, because the premises themselves are simply absurd. I 
 deny that the considerable body of our countrymen described by the 
 Examiner as ' the non-literary class ' has the least gratification in wit- 
 nessing the degradation or disparagement of literary men. Why accuse 
 ' the non-literary class ' of being so ungrateful t If the writings of an 
 author give a reader pleasure or profit, surely the latter will have a 
 favourable opinion of the person who so benefits him. What intelligent 
 man, of what political views, but would receive with respect and welcome 
 that writer of the Examiner of whom your paper once said, that ' he 
 made all England laugh and think ? ' Who would deny to that brilliant 
 wit, that polished satirist, his just tribute of respect and admiration 1 ^ 
 Does any man who has written a book worth reading — apy poet, 
 historian, novelist, man of science -lose reputation by his character for 
 genius or for learning.? Does he not, on the contrary, get friends, 
 sympathy, applause — money, perhaps ? — all good and pleasant things in 
 themselves, and not ungenerously awarded as they are honestly won. 
 That generous faith in men of letters, that kindly regard in which the 
 whole reading nation holds them, appear to me to be so clearly shown in 
 our country every day, that to question them would be as absurd as, 
 permit me to say for my part, it would be ungrateful. What is it that 
 fills mechanics institutes in the great provincial towns when literary 
 men are invited to attend their festivals 1 Has not every literary man of 
 mark his friends and his circle, his hundreds or his tens of thousands of 
 readers 2 And has not every one had from these constant and affecting 
 testimonials of the esteem in which they hold him ? It is of course one 
 writers lot, from the nature of his subject, or of his genius, to command 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 337 
 
 the sympathies or awaken the curiosity of many more readers than shall 
 choose to hsten to another author ; but surely all get their hearing. The 
 literary profession is not held in disrepute ; nobody wants to disparage 
 it ; no man loses his social rank, whatever it may be, by practising it. 
 On the contrary, the pen gives a place in the world to men who had none 
 before — a fair place fairly achieved by their genius ; as any other degree 
 of eminence is by any other kind of merit. Literary men need not, as it 
 seems to me, be in the least querulous about their position any more, or 
 want the pity of anybody. The money-prizes which the chief among 
 them get are not so high as those which fall to men of other callings— to 
 bishops, or to judges, or to opera-singers and actors ; nor have they re- 
 ceived stars and garters as yet, or peerages and governorships of islands, 
 such as fall to the lot of military otficers. The rewards of the profession 
 are not to be measured by the money standard ; for one man spends a 
 life of learning and labour on a book which does not pay the printer's 
 bill, and another gets a Httle fortune by a few light volumes. But, putting 
 the money out of the question, I beheve that the social estimation of the 
 man of letters is as good as it deserves to be, and as good as that of any 
 other professional man. With respect to the question in debate between 
 you and the Examiner as to the propriety of public rewards and honours 
 for literary men, I don't see why men of letters should not very cheerfully 
 coincide with Mr. Examiner in accepting all the honours, places, and 
 prizes which they can get. The amount of such as will be awarded to 
 them will not, we may be pretty sure, impoverish the country much ; and 
 if it is the custom of the State to reward by money, or titles of honour, 
 or stars and garters of any sort, individuals who do the country service, — 
 and if individuals are gratified at having ' Sir,' or ' My Lord' appended 
 to their names, or stars and ribands hooked on their coats and waistcoats, 
 as men most undoubtedly are, and as their wives, families, and relations 
 are, there can be no reason why men of letters should not have the 
 chance, as well as men of the robe or the sword ; or why, if honour and 
 money are good for one profession, why they should not be good for 
 another. No man in other callings thinks himself degraded by receiving 
 a reward from his government ; nor, surely need the Hterary man be 
 more squeamish about pensions, and ribands, and titles, than the am- 
 bassador, or general, or judge. Every European state but ours rewards 
 its men of letters ; the American government gives them their full share 
 of its small patronage, and if Americans, why not Englishmen ? If Pitt 
 Crawby is disappointed at not getting a riband on retiring from his 
 diplomatic post at Pumpernickel, if General O'Dowd is pleased to be 
 called Sir Hector O'Dowd, K.C.B., and his wife at being denominated 
 my Lady O'Dowd, are literary men to be the only persons exempt from 
 vanity, and is it to be a sin in them to covet honour .? And now, with 
 regard to the charge against myself of fostering baneful prejudices 
 against our calling— to which I no more plead guilty than 1 should think 
 Fielding would have done, if he had been accused of a design to bring 
 the Church into contempt by describing Parson Tralliber, — permit me 
 
338 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 to say that before you deliver sentence it would be as well If you had 
 waited to hear the whole of the argument. Who knows what is coming 
 in the future numbers of the work whicli has incurred your displeasure 
 and the Exai7iiner^s^ and whether you, in accusing me of prejudice, and 
 the Examiner (alas !) of swindling and flattering the public, have not 
 been premature ? Time and the hour may solve this mystery, for which 
 the candid reader is referred ' to our next.' That I have a prejudice 
 against running into debt, and drunkenness, and disorderly life, and 
 against quackery and falsehood in my profession, I own, and that I like 
 to have a laugh at those pretenders who write confidential news about 
 fashion and politics for provincial gobemouches j but I am not aware of 
 feeling any malice in describing this weakness, or of doing anything 
 wrong in exposing the former vices. Have they never existed amongst 
 literary men ? Have their talents never been urged as a plea for im- 
 providence, and their very faults adduced as a consequence of their 
 genius.'' The only moral that I, as a writer, wished to hint in the 
 descriptions against which you protest, was, that it was the duty of a 
 literary man, as well as any other, to practise regularity and sobriety, to 
 love his family, and to pay his tradesmen. Nor is this picture I have 
 drawn * a caricature which I condescend to,' any more than it is a wilful 
 and insidious design on my part to flatter ' the non-literary class.' If it 
 be a caricature, it is the result of a natural perversity of vision, not of an 
 artful desire to mislead ; but my attempt was to tell the truth, and 1 
 meant to tell it not unkindly. I have seen the bookseller whom Bludyer 
 robbed of his books ; I have carried money, and from a noble brother 
 man-of-letters, to some one not unlike Shandon in prison, and have 
 watched the beautiful devotion of his wife in that dreary place. Why 
 are these things not to be described, if they illustrate, as they appear to 
 me to do, that strange and awful struggle of good and wrong which takes 
 place in our hearts and in the world .? It may be that I worked out my 
 moral ill, or it may be possible that the critic of the Examiner fails in 
 apprehension. My eff'orts as an artist come perfectly within his province 
 as a censor ; but when Mr. Examiner says of a gentleman that he is 
 ' stooping to flatter a public prejudice,' which public prejudice does not 
 exist, I submit that he makes a charge which is as absurd as it is un- 
 just, and am thankful that it repels itself. And instead of accusing the 
 public of persecuting and disparaging us as a class, it seems to me that 
 men of letters had best silently assume that they are as good as any other 
 gentlemen, nor raise piteous controversies upon a question which all 
 people of sense must take to be settled. If I sit at your table, I suppose 
 that I am my neighbour's equal as that he is mine. If I begin straight- 
 way with a protest of ^ Sir, I am a literary man, but I would have you to 
 know I am as good as you,' which of us is it that questions the dignity of 
 the literary profession— my neighbour who would like to eat his soup in 
 quiet, or the man of letters who commences the argument 1 And 1 hope 
 that a comic writer, because he describes one author as improvident, and 
 another as a paiasite, may not only be guiltless of a desire to vilify 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 339 
 
 the profession, but may really have its honour at heart. If there are no 
 spendthrifts, or parasites amongst us, the satire becomes unjust ; but if 
 such exist, or have existed, they are as good subjects for comedy as men 
 of other calHngs. I never heard that the Bar felt itself aggrieved because 
 Pnnch chose to describe Mr. Dunup's notorious state of insolvency, or 
 that the picture of Stiggins in ' Pickwick ' was intended as an insult to 
 all Dissenters, or that all the attorneys in the empire were indignant at 
 the famous history of the firm of ' Quirk, Gammon, and Snap.' Are we 
 to be passed over because we are faultless, or because we cannot afford 
 to be laughed at "i And if every character in a story is to represent a 
 class, not an individual — if every bad figure is to have its obliged contrast 
 of a good one, and a balance of vice and virtue is to be struck — novels, 
 I think, would become impossible, as they would be intolerably stupid 
 and unnatural, and there would be a lamentable end of writers and 
 readers of such compositions. 
 
 " Believe me. Sir, to be your very faithful servant, 
 
 " W. M. Thackeray." 
 
 In the April of the same year Thackeray again addressed the editor of 
 the Morning Chronicle — perhaps the most delightfully whimsical of all 
 his letters. It is quite as good in its way as his reply to the Times 
 criticism (" An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer '') on " The Kickleburys 
 on the Rhine," pubHshed in the same year. It is entitled — 
 
 "CAPERS AND ANCHOVIES. 
 " To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle. 
 
 " Sir, — I hope no Irish gentleman will be insulted at my recalling a story, 
 venerable for its antiquity, of the Irish officer who, having stated that he 
 had seen anchovies growing in profusion upon the rocks of Malta, called 
 out and shot an Englishman who doubted his statement. As the unhappy 
 Saxon fell writhing with his wound, the Irishman's second remarked, 
 ' Look, Sir Lucius ! you have made him cut capers ! ' * Bedad, its 
 capers I mane ! ' the gallant and impetuous O'Trigger remarked, and 
 instantly apologized in the handsomest terms to his English antagonist 
 for his error. It was capers he had seen, and not anchovies, growing on 
 the rocks ; the blunder was his, but the bullet was in the Englishman's 
 leg, who went away grumbling because the other had not thought of the 
 truth before. 
 
 " Sir, three Irish newspapers, and an Irish Member of Parliament in his 
 place in the Rotunda, have delivered their fire into me through a similar 
 error. Every post brings me letters containing extracts from Irish papers, 
 sent to me by friends, and one of them, who is most active in my behalf, 
 informs me that there is a body of Irish gentlemen who are bent upon 
 cudgelling me, and who are very likely waiting at my door whilst I write 
 from the club, where, of course, I have denied myself. It is these, while 
 it is yet time, whom 1 wish to prevent ; and as many of them will 
 
340 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 probably read your journal to-morrow morning, you may possibly be the 
 means of saving my bones, valuable to me and my family, and which I 
 prefer before any apology for breaking them. The blunder of which I 
 am the victim is at once absurd and painful, and I am sorry to be 
 obliged to have recourse to the press for explanation. 
 . " Ten years ago I wrote a satirical story in Fraser's Magazine^ called 
 ' Catherine,' and founded upon the history of the murderess, Catherine 
 Hayes. The tale was intended to ridicule a taste then prevalent for 
 making novel-heroes of Newgate malefactors. Every single personage in 
 my story was a rascal, and hanged, or put to a violent death ; and the 
 history became so atrocious that it created a general dissatisfaction, and 
 was pronounced to be horribly immoral. While the public went on 
 reading the works which I had intended to ridicule, ' Catherine ' was, in 
 a word, a failure, and is dead, with all its heroes. 
 
 " In the last number of the story of ' Pendennis ' (which was written 
 when I was absent from this country, and not in the least thinking about 
 the opera here), I wrote a sentence to the purport that the greatest 
 criminals and murderers — Bluebeard, George Barnwell, Catherine Hayes 
 — had some spark of human feeling, and found some friends, — meaning 
 thereby to encourage minor criminals not to despair. And my only 
 thought in producing the last of these instances was about Mrs. Hayes, 
 who died at Tyburn, and subsequently perished in my novel, and not in 
 the least about an amiable and beautiful young lady now acting at Her 
 Majesty's theatre. I quite forgot her existence. I was pointing my moral 
 such as it was, with quite a different person, and never for a single 
 instant, I declare on my word of honour, remembering the young lady, 
 nor knowing anything regarding her engagement at the Haymarket. 
 
 "From this unlucky sentence in 'Pendennis' my tribulations begin, 
 and my capers are held up as the most wicked anchovies to indignant 
 Ireland. Vindex writes to the Freeman's Journal^ saying that I have an 
 intention to insult the Irish nation in the person bf an accomplished and 
 innocent young lady, whom I class with murderers and cut-throats, 
 whereby I damn myself to everlasting infamy. The Freeman's Journal^ 
 in language intelligible always, if not remarkable for grammatical or 
 other propriety, says I am ' the Big Blubberman, the hugest humbug 
 ever thrust on the public,' that I am guilty of unmanly grossness and 
 cowardly assault, and that I wrote to ruin Miss Hayes, but did not 
 succeed. The Freeman adds, in a concluding paragraph, that there may 
 have been some person happening to bear a name coincident with that 
 of the Freenians accomplished countrywoman ; and that if I have this 
 very simple and complete defence to make, I shall hasten to offer it. I 
 don't take in the Freeman^ Joui'-nal — I am not likely to be very anxious 
 about reading it, — but the Freeman never gives me any notice of the 
 attack which I am to hasten to defend, and, calling me coward and 
 ruffian, leaves me. It is the anchovy-caper question settled in the 
 approved manner. 
 
 " The Mail^ assuming that I intended insult and injury, remarks on 
 
A DAY WITH. W. M. THACKERAY. 341 
 
 the incriminated sentence thus : * Its brutality is so far neutralized by its 
 absurdity as to render it utterly harmless.' No. 2. 
 
 " No. 3. The Packet^ speaking on the judgment of both of its contempo- 
 raries, says, admirably : — 
 
 " * This prompt and chivalrous espousal of a ladfs cause is just what we 
 would have expected from our brethren of the Irish press ^ and will be no 
 doubt a source of mtich gratification to Miss Hayes. But .... we 
 only think it fair to state that he has not been guilty of the * incredibly 
 gross act' of associating our pure and amiable Catherine with the 
 murderers and tyrants about whom he has written so nonsensically.' 
 
 "And then follows the revelation of the mystery about the real Catherine, 
 the writer remarking that I am neither a fool nor a madman, and that I 
 would not outrage Miss Hayes, lest some Saxon should kick me. 
 
 " Sir, if some pictures of the Irish, drawn by foreign hands, are carica- 
 tures, what are they compared to the pictures of the Irish drawn by 
 themselves.? Would any man — could any man out of Ireland — invent 
 such an argument as the last ? It stands thus — 
 
 " I. I have not intended to injure, nor have I in the least injured Miss 
 Hayes 
 
 " 2. The people who have abused me for injuring her have acted with 
 chivalrous promptitude, and, no doubt, have greatly gratified Miss Hayes. 
 Poor young lady ! she is to be gratified by seeing a man belaboured who 
 never thought of her or meant her a wrong. 
 
 " 3. But if I had injured Miss Hayes, many Saxon boot-toes would have 
 taught me decency ; that is, capers not being anchovies, gentlemen 
 would have acted with much chivalry in shooting me ; and if capers had 
 been anchovies, I should richly have merited a kicking. Comfortable 
 dilemma ! 
 
 " I should not have noticed this charge except in Ireland, believing that 
 it must be painful to the young lady whose name has been most inno- 
 cently and unfortunately brought foi-ward ; but I see the case has already 
 passed the Channel, and that there is no help for all parties but publicity. 
 I declare upon my honour, then, to Miss Hayes, that I am grieved to have 
 been the means of annoying her, if I have done so ; and I need not tell 
 any gentleman— what gentleman would question me .?— that I never for a 
 moment could mean an insult to innocence, and genius, and beauty. 
 " I am, sir, your very faithful servant, 
 
 "W. M. Thackeray." 
 
 " Garrick Club, April 11, 1850. 
 
 When Thackeray was writing "The Newcomes," a passage of irony 
 about Washington was misunderstood as an insult deliberately offered to 
 the hero of American idolatry, and commented upon by the New York 
 correspondent of the Times. Having quoted the offensive passage, 
 Thackeray set himself to answer it in the leading journal, in his own 
 peculiar way ; — 
 
342 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 "Having published the American critic's comment," he wrote, "permti 
 the author of a faulty sentence to say what he did mean, and to add the 
 obvious moral of the apologue which has been so oddly construed. I am 
 speaking of a young apprentice coming to London between the years 
 1770 and '80, and want to depict a few figures of the last century. (The 
 illustrated head letter of the chapter was intended to represent Hogarth^s 
 * Industrious Apprentice.') I fancy the old society, with its hoops and 
 powder — Barrd or Fox thundering at Lord North asleep on the Treasury 
 bench — the newsreaders at the coffee-room talking over the paper, and 
 owning that this Mr. Washington, who was leading the rebels, was a very 
 courageous soldier, and worthy of a better cause than fighting against 
 King George. The images are at least natural and pretty consecutive. 
 1776 — the people of London in '76 — the Lords and House of Commons 
 in '76 — Lord North — Washington— what the people thought about 
 Washington — I am thinking about '76. Where, in the name of common 
 sense, is the insult to 1853 ? The satire, if satire there be, applies to us 
 at home, who called Washington ' Mr. Washington ; ' as we called 
 Frederick the Great 'the Protestant Hero,' or Napoleon 'the Corsican 
 Tyrant,' or ' General Bonaparte.' Need I say that our officers were 
 instructed (until they were taught better manners) to call Washington 
 'Mr. Washington?' and that the Americans were called rebels during 
 the whole of the contest ? Rebels ? — of course they were rebels ; and I 
 should like to know what native American would have not been a rebel 
 in that cause ? 
 
 " As irony is dangerous, and has hurt the feelings of kind friends whom 
 I would not wish to offend, let me say, in perfect faith and gravity, that I 
 think the cause for which Washington fought entirely just and right, and 
 the champion the very noblest, purest, bravest, best of God's men." 
 
 And then how charming was his final leave-taking with his American 
 friends in that dainty little poem : 
 
 ** To all good friends in Boston, Mass. ! " 
 
HIS SPEECHES AND SPEECH-MAKING. 
 
 Thackeray was, even to his latest day, and after considerable ex- 
 perience, an uncertain speaker. The idea that he had to make a speech 
 on any occasion disturbed his mind, and worked upon his nerves. I 
 remember on one occasion sitting near him at a club dinner (we were not 
 more than twenty), when the ciiairman proposed his health as the guest 
 of the evening. Thackeray, while the compliments were being showered 
 upon him, whispered to me that had he known it he would have been at 
 least twenty miles away from that table at that moment. His reply was 
 nervous and spasmodic ; and he charged the chairman with having been 
 guilty of great cruelty towards him, and with having spoiled his evening. 
 Sometimes he would suddenly break down : at others, his words would 
 flow placidly from him to the end ; but he never managed a peroration, 
 nor rose to eloquence. He gossiped in his own delightful way with his 
 audience — when he was in the mood ; and when he could not do this 
 easily, he collapsed. The set phrases, the rhetorical flights, the clap-traps 
 of a chairmanship, were impossible to him. It has been said by a writer 
 of a popular memoir of Thackeray * that his speeches were always 
 unstudied— " as the occasions when they were uttered allowed that 
 freedom of fancy, and play of sudden thought, of which the pen is not 
 always willing to make use." But this was not so. When Thackeray 
 had a grave occasion before him, he not only thought over what he had 
 to say— like Dickens, who took a long walk and arranged his happy 
 thoughts in the manner we remember ; but he often dictated his speech 
 to his secretary. Take the following witness — George Hodder — whose 
 testimony on this subject is unimpeachable. The occasion was the 
 memorable dinner given to him on the eve of his departure for America. 
 "On the morning of the banquet he was in a state of great nervous 
 anxiety, saying that it was very kind of his friends to give him a dinner, 
 but that he wished it was over, for such things always set him trembling. 
 " Besides," he exclaimed, " I have to make a speech, and what am I to 
 say ? Here, take a pen in your hand and sit down ; and 111 see if I can 
 hammer out something. It's hammering now ; I'm afraid it will be 
 staniviering by-and-bye." I did as he requested, and he dictated with 
 much ease and fluency a speech — or rather the heads of a speech — which he 
 proposed delivering in response to the inevitable toast of his own health. 
 
 * "Thackeray — the Humourist and Man of Letters. The Story of his Life," 
 by T. Taylor. John Camden Hotten. 
 
342 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 "This was on a morning in the first week of October, 1855, and the 
 dinner took place at the London Tavern in the evening of the same day, 
 the duties of chairman being delegated to Mr. Charles Dickens, who 
 from the very beginning of his public career had always manifested a 
 remarkable aptitude for that responsible office." 
 
 " The following account of the affair was afterwards published by a 
 gentleman who was present on the occasion : — 
 
 " * The Thackeray dinner was a triumph. Covers, we are assured, were 
 laid for sixty ; and sixty and no more sat down precisely at the minute 
 named to do honour to the great novelist. Sixty very hearty shakes of 
 the hand did Thackeray receive from sixty friends on that occasion ; and 
 hearty cheers from sixty vociferous and friendly tongues followed the 
 chairman's — Mr. Charles Dickens — proposal of his health, and of wishes 
 for his speedy and successful return among us. Dickens -the best after 
 dinner speaker now ahve — was never happier. He spoke as if he was 
 fully conscious that it was a great occasion, and that the absence of even 
 one reporter was a matter of congratulation, affording ample room to 
 unbend. The table was in the shape of a horse-shoe, having two vice- 
 chairmen, and this circumstance was wrought up and played with by 
 Dickens in the true Sam Weller and Charles Dickens manner. Thackeray, 
 who is far from what is called a good speaker, outdid himself. There 
 was his usual hesitation ; but this hesitation becomes his manner of 
 speaking and his matter, and is never unpleasant to his hearers, though 
 it is, we are assured, most irksome to himself. This speech was full of 
 pathos and humour, and oddity, with bits of prepared parts imperfectly 
 recollected, but most happily made good by the fehcities of the passing 
 moment. Like the ' Last Minstrel,' 
 
 *' ' Each blank in faithless memory's void 
 The poets glowing thought supplied.' 
 
 " It was a speech to remember for its earnestness of purpose and its 
 undoubted originality. Then the chaii-man quitted, and many near and 
 at a distance quitted with him. Thackeray was on the move with the 
 chairman, when, inspired by the moment, Jerrold took the chair, and 
 Thackeray remained. Who is to chronicle what now passed ? — what 
 passages of wit— what neat and pleasant sarcastic speeches in proposing 
 healths— what varied and pleasant, ay, and at times sarcastic acknow- 
 ledgments ? Up to the time when Dickens left, a good reporter might 
 have given all, and with care, to future ages ; but there could be no 
 reporting what followed. There were words too nimble and too full of 
 flame for a dozen Gurneys, all ears, to catch and preserve. Few will 
 forget that night. There was an ' air of wit ' about the room for three 
 days after. Enough to make the two companies, though downright fools, 
 right witty.' 
 
 " I am now fortunately enabled to give the original draft of the speech 
 thus pictured, and which, as I have just stated, was written by me, to Mk. 
 Thackeray's dictation on the morning of the dinner. It will be seen from 
 the occasional vacant spaces, that the writer of the above was correct in 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. . 345 
 
 assuming that the speaker had intentionally left blanks with the view of 
 supplying them at the moment. Some few sentences will be found to be 
 quite incomplete, but it is not very difficult to conjecture how Mr. 
 Thackeray would fill them up ; though I believe I am right in saying that 
 the speech as delivered fell far short of the speech as written. The latter 
 has never been out of my possession since it came from Mr. Thackeray's 
 lips, for having once tested his power and brought to light the thoughts 
 which animated him, he did not care for the MS., and did not even read 
 it. I subjoin it, ipsissima verba : — 
 
 " ' I know great numbers of us here present have been invited to a 
 neighbouring palace, where turtle, champagne, and all good things are as 
 plentiful almost as here, and where there reigns a civic monarch with a 
 splendid court of officers, &c. The sort of greeting that I had myself 
 to-day — this splendour, &c. — the bevy in the ante-room — have filled my 
 bosom with an elation with which no doubt Sir Francis Graham Moon's 
 throbs. I am surrounded by respectful friends, &c., — and I feel myself 
 like a Lord Mayor. To his Lordship's delight and magnificence there is 
 a drawback. In the fountain oihis pleasure there surges a bitter. He is 
 thinking about the ninth of November, and I about the thirteenth of 
 October. 
 
 "Some years since, when I was younger and used to frequent jolly 
 assemblies, I wrote a Bacchanalian song, to be chanted after dinner, &c. 
 I wish some one would sing that song now to the tune of the " Dead 
 March in Saul,' &c., not for me— I am miserable enough, — but for you, 
 who seem in a great deal too good spirits. I tell you I am not — all the 
 drink in Mr. Bathe's cellar won't make me. There may be sherry there 
 500 years old : Columbus may have taken it out from Cadiz with him 
 when he went to discover America : and it won't make me jolly, &c. ; 
 and yet, entirely unsatisfactory as this feast is to me, I should like some 
 more. Why can't you give me some more.? I don't care^bout them 
 costing two guineas a-head. It is not the turtle I value. Let us go to 
 Simpson's fish ordinary, or to Bertolini's, or John o' Groats', &c. — I don't 
 want to go away — I cling round the mahogany tree. 
 
 " In the course of my profound and extensive reading, I have found it 
 is the habit of the English nation to give dinners to the unfortunate. I 
 have been living lately with some worthy singular fellows 150 or 160 years 
 old. I find that upon certain occasions the greatest attention was always 
 p^id them. They might call for anything they liked for dinner. My 
 friend Simon Eraser, Lord Lovat, about 109 years since, I think, partook 
 very cheerfully of minced veal and sack before he was going on his 
 journey.— Lord Ferrers (Rice). I could tell you a dozen jolly stories about 
 feasts of this sort. I remember a particularly jolly one at which I was 
 present, and which took place at least 900 years ago. My friend, Mr. 
 Macready, gave it at Forres Castle, North Britain, Covent Garden. 
 That was a magnificent affair indeed. The tables were piled with most 
 splendid fruits ; gorgeous dish-covers glittered in endless perspective ; — 
 Macbeth —Macready, I mean,— taking up a huge gold beaker, shining 
 
 2 A 
 
346 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 with enormous g-ems that must have been worth many hundred millions 
 of money, filled it out of a gold six-gallon jug, and drank courteously to 
 the general health of the whole table. Why did he put it down ? What 
 made him, in the midst of that jolly party, appear so haggard and 
 melancholy? It was because he saw before him the ghost of John 
 Cooper, with chalked face, and an immense streak of vermilion painted 
 across his throat ! No wonder he was disturbed. In like manner I have 
 before me at this minute the horrid figure of a steward, with a basin 
 perhaps, or a glass of brandy and water, which he will press me to drink 
 and which I shall try and swallow, and which won't make me any better 
 — I know it won't. 
 
 " Then there's the dinner, which we all of us must remember in our 
 schoolboy days, and which took place twice or thrice a year at home, on 
 the day before Dr. Birch expected his young friends to reassemble at his 
 academy, Rodwell Regis. Don't you remember how the morning was 
 spent ? — how you went about taking leave of the garden, and the old 
 mare and foal, and the paddock, and the pointers in the kennel ? — and how 
 your little sister wistfully kept at your side all day ? and how you went and 
 looked at that confounded trunk which old Martha was packing with the 
 new shirts, and at that heavy cake packed up in the play-box ? and how 
 kind ' the governor ' was all day ; and how at dinner he said ' Jack, or 
 Tom, pass the bottle,' in a very cheery voice P and how your mother had 
 got the dishes she knew you liked best? and how you had the wing 
 instead of the leg, which used to be your ordinary share ? and how that 
 dear, delightful, hot raspberry roley-poley pudding, good as it was, and 
 fondly beloved by you, yet somehow had the effect of the notorious school 
 stickjaw, and choked you and stuck in your throat ? and how the gig 
 came ? and then how you heard the whirl of mail-coach wheels and the 
 tooting of the guard's horn, as, with an odious punctuality, the mail and 
 the four horses came galloping over the hill. Shake hands ! good-bye ! 
 God bless everybody ! Don't cry, sister ! and to-morrow we begin with 
 Dr. Birch and six months at Rodwell Regis. 
 
 " But after six months came the holidays again, &c., &c., &c." 
 
 In a speech delivered in 1849 — which is an excellent sample of his 
 point of view in regard to his own vocation — he confessed that he had 
 forgotten his written words. But he was in a fair humour, and so 
 gossipped on : — 
 
 " I suppose, Mr. Chairman, years ago when you had a duty to perform, 
 you did not think much about, or look to, what men of genius and men 
 of eloquence in England might say of you ; but you went and you did 
 your best with all your power, and what was the result ? You determined 
 to do your best on the next occasion. I believe that is the philosophy of 
 what I have been doing in the course of my life ; I don't know whether 
 it has tended to fame, or to laughter, or to seriousness ; but I have tried 
 to say the truth, and as far as I know, I have tried to describe what I 
 saw before me, as best I might, and to like my neighbour as well as my 
 neighbour would let me hke him. All the rest of the speech which I had 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 347 
 
 prepared, has fled into thin air ; the only part of it which I remember, 
 was an apology for, or rather an encomium of, the profession of us 
 novelists, which, I am bound to say, for the honour of our calling, ought 
 to rank with the very greatest literary occupations. Why should 
 historians take precedence of us ? Our personages are as real as theirs. 
 For instance, I maintain that our friends Parson Adams and Dr. Prim- 
 rose are characters as authentic as Dr. Sacheverell, or Dr. Warburton, 
 or any reverend personage of their times. Gil Bias is quite as real and 
 as good a man as the Duke of Lerma, and, I believe, a great deal more 
 so. I was thinking, too, that Don Quixote was to my mind as real a 
 man as Don John or the Duke of Alva ; and then I was turning to the 
 history of a gentleman of whom I am particularly fond— a school-fellow 
 of mine before Dr. Russell's time. I was turning to the life and history 
 of one with whom we are all acquainted, and that is one Mr. Joseph 
 Addison, who, I remember, was made Under-Secretary of State at one 
 period of his life, under another celebrated man. Sir Charles Hedges, I 
 think it was, but it is now so long ago I am not sure ; but I have no 
 doubt Mr. Addison was much more proud of his connection with Sir 
 Charles Hedges, and his place in Downing Street, and his red box, and 
 his quarter's salary, punctually and regularly paid ; I dare say he was 
 much more proud of these than of any literary honour which he received, 
 such as being the author of the * Tour to Italy,' and the ' Campaign.' 
 But after all, though he was indubitably connected with Sir Charles 
 Hedges, there was another knight with whom he was much more con- 
 nected, and that was a certain Sir Roger de Coverley, whom we have 
 always loved, and believed in a thousand times better than a thousand 
 Sir Charles Hedges. And as I look round at this, my table, gentlemen, 
 I cannot but perceive that the materials for my favourite romances are 
 never likely to be wanted to future authors." 
 
 Thackeray was fond of dwelling on the merits and position of his own 
 profession — always to claim independence and honour for it. He said, 
 at the 1 85 1 Literary Fund Dinner, — 
 
 " I don't believe in the literary man being obliged to resort to ignoble 
 artifices and mean flatteries to get places at the tables of the great, and 
 to enter into society upon sufferance. I don't believe in the patrons of 
 this present day, except such patrons as I am happy to have in you, and 
 as any honest man might be proud to have, and shake by the hand, and 
 be shaken by the hand by. Therefore I propose from this day forward 
 that the oppressed literary man should disappear from among us. The 
 times are altered ; the people don't exist ; * the patron and the jail,' 
 praise God, are vanished from out our institutions. It may be possible 
 that the eminent Mr. Edmund Curl stood in the pillory in the time of 
 Queen Anne, who, thank God, is dead ; it may be that in the reign of 
 another celebrated monarch of these realms. Queen Elizabeth, authors 
 who abused the persons of honour, would have had their arms cut off on 
 the first offence, and be hanged on the second. Gentlemen, what would 
 be the position of my august friend and patron, Mr. Punch, if that were 
 
348 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 now the case ? Where would be his hands, and his neck, and his ears, 
 and his bowels ? He would be disembowelled, and his members cast 
 about the land. We don't want patrons, we want friends ; and, I thank 
 God we have them. And as fpr any idea that our calling is despised by 
 the world, I do, for my part, protest against and deny the whole state- 
 ment. I have been in all sorts of society in this world and I never have 
 been despised that I know of. I don't believe there has been a literary 
 man of the slightest merit, or of the slightest mark, who did not greatly 
 advance himself by his literary labours. I see along this august table 
 gentlemen whom I have had the honour of shaking by the hand, and 
 gentlemen whom I should never have called my friends, but for the 
 humble literary labours I have been engaged in. And, therefore, I say 
 don't let us be pitied any more. As for pity being employed upon authors, 
 especially in my branch of the profession, if you will but look at the 
 novehsts of the present day, I think you will see it is altogether out of the 
 question to pity them. We will take, in the first place, if you please, a 
 great novelist who is the great head of a great party in a great assembly 
 in this country. When this celebrated man went into his county to be 
 proposed to represent it, and he was asked on what interest he stood ? he 
 nobly said, ' he stood on his head.^ And who can question the gallantry 
 and brilliancy of that eminent crest of his, and what man will deny the great 
 merit of Mr. Disraeli ? Take next another novelist, who writes from his 
 ancestral hall, and addresses John Bull in letters on matters of politics, 
 and John Bull buys eight editions of those letters. Is not this a prospect 
 for a novelist ? There is a third, who is employed upon this very evening, 
 heart and hand — heart and voice, I may say, — on a work of charity. 
 And what is the consequence? The Queen of the realm, the greatest 
 nobles of the empire, all the great of the world, will assemble to see him 
 and to do him honour. I say, therefore, don't let us have pity. I don't 
 want it till I really do want it. Of course it is impossible for us to settle 
 the mere prices by which the works of those who amuse the pubHc are to 
 be paid. I am perfectly aware that Signer Twankeydillo, of the Italian 
 Opera, and Mademoiselle Petitpas of the Haymarket, will get a great 
 deal more money in a week, for the skilful exercise of their chest and 
 toes, than I, or you, or any gentleman, shall be able to get by our brains, 
 and by weeks of hard labour. We cannot help these differences in pay- 
 ment : we know there must be high and low payments in our trade as in 
 all trades ; that there must be gluts of the market, and over-production ; 
 that there must be successful machinery, and rivals, and brilliant impor- 
 tations from foreign countries ; that there must be hands out of employ, 
 and tribulation of workmen. But these ill winds which afflict us blow 
 fortunes to our successors. These are natural evils. It is the progress of 
 the world rather than any evil which we can remedy, and that is why I 
 say this society acts most wisely and justly in endeavouring to remedy, 
 not the chronic distress, but the temporary evil ; that it finds a man at 
 the moment of the pinch of necessity, helps him a little, and gives him a 
 * God speed ! ' and sends him on his way." 
 
t^sMisia 
 
 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 
 
 Without pausing to discuss whether or no William Makepeace 
 Thackeray belonged, as Mr. James Hannay has asserted in his memoir, 
 to " the upper middle class," or to the middle class proper (people are 
 very proud of being on the right side of even the thinnest partitions, in 
 this country), we may note that he was descended from an ancient 
 Saxon race, long rooted in Yorkshire. Mr. Hannay, who delights in the 
 details, records : — " His great-grandfather was Dr. Thackeray, of Harrow, 
 who went to Cambridge in 17 lo, an excellent scholar and clever man, 
 who partly educated Sir William Jones, and whose epitaph was written 
 by his pupil, Dr. Parr. The son of the Doctor married a Miss Webb, of 
 the old English family to which the Brigadier Webb, of Marlborough's 
 wars, belonged, — whose portrait is drawn with something of the geniality 
 of kinsmanship in Esmond. This Thackeray, we believe, was th^ first of 
 the race to settle in India ; where his son also sought his fortunes ; and 
 where his grandson, the novelist, was born — at Calcutta, in 181 1. There 
 are numerous descendants of the scholarly old head-master of Harrow 
 scattered over the English Church and in the Indian Service, and traces 
 of the influence of family connections are found all through the books of 
 the man who has made his name famous. The feudal feeling of Scott — 
 which in any case is Scotch rather than English — Thackeray did not 
 share. Heraldry to him had only the quaint interest and prettiness of 
 old china. But it is impossible to appreciate either his philosophy, his 
 style, or his literary position, without remembering that he was a well- 
 born, well-bred, and well-educated gentleman." Thackeray, Hannay 
 relates, used to say that it took three generations to make a gentleman ; 
 but he certainly never sa|d it in the spirit in which the author of Satire 
 and Satirists repeats it. Thackeray throughout his life was a sincere and 
 thorough Liberal ; fastidious in the forms of his rare political activity, 
 but as downright and uncompromising as the noisiest of his party. 
 
 Thackeray was sent home from Calcutta at an early age. One of his 
 earliest recollections is a peep at the mighty Napoleon, caged, under the 
 ferocious guardianship of Lowe, in St. Helena ; and this stirred within 
 him, when long years later he wrote the " Chronicle of the Drum,'' 
 after seeing the ashes of the hero carried under the dome of the In- 
 valides. He was educated, like his friend John Leech, at the Charter- 
 
350 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 house— the Greyfriars of his imaginary work ; and for those quiet, 
 studious days he was ever grateful. Mr. Hannay says that in after Hfe 
 he let his Greek slip away from him ; but that his acquaintance with the 
 Latin language, and especially the Latin poets, was eminently respectable, 
 and exercised a profound influence over his genius and his diction. 
 
 From the Charterhouse Thackeray went to Cambridge — leaving with- 
 out having taken a degree. Mr. Charles Kent, in his " Footprints on the 
 Road," gives a fuller and more authentic account of Thackeray's advance 
 from childhood to fame and self-won fortune than any I have read. 
 Guarding himself against all unwarrantable intrusions upon the sanctities 
 of private life, Mr. Kent says : — 
 
 " We may loiter and chat among the pillars of the peristyle without 
 any infraction of the laws of courtesy — if we but pause upon the inner 
 threshold, if we abstain from lifting the curtain veiling the porch of the 
 triclinium, if we but bear in remembrance the symbolic rose carved upon 
 the old classic ceilings over the centre of the banquet-table — the rose 
 ever since those days, or rather nights, of the ancient symposium im- 
 parting a proverbial sanctity to social converse. Guided by this rational 
 sense of what is alone allowable to the biographer of those very recently 
 deceased, we would here trace in a few rapid touches the leading points 
 in the path traversed by W. M. Thackeray in his advance from child- 
 hood to maturity ; from the period when, as a rough-pated urchin, he 
 first donned the gown doubly famous now as that worn also, once upon 
 a time, by old Flos (Sir Henry Havelock), and by old Codd Colonel 
 (dear Thomas Newcombe), upon entering as a boy-scholar the old 
 monastic Charterhouse. There, among the Cistercians, as he loved to 
 call them, Thackeray received his early education. Removed thence in 
 due- course to the University of Cambridge, there, among his contem- 
 poraries, were numbered several who were destined, like himself, to 
 achieve some reputation in literature. Foremost amongst these aspiring 
 striplings, the now laureate, Alfred Tennyson. Noticeable among them 
 — in a lesser and varied degree — Mitchell Kemble, the late gifted Saxon 
 antiquary ; Monckton Milnes, now Lord Houghton ; Alexander .Kings- 
 lake, author of the brilliant, cynical ' Eothen ; ' with that other famous 
 Oriental traveller, upon whom we have already commented, meaning the 
 ill-fated and lamented Eliot Warburton." 
 
 " Originally intended for a career at the bar, Mr. Thackeray kept seven 
 or eight terms while at Cambridge, but eventually quitted the university 
 without a degree, bent upon obeying implicitly, and with all reasonable 
 despatch, the earliest promptings of his youthful ambition, then inciting 
 him at the outset of his career to become, in preference to anything else, 
 an artist. In this design he appears to have been encouraged, at the 
 period, by a variety of circumstances. Immediately, for example, upon 
 coming of age, in 1832, he found himself in possession by inheritance, if 
 not of an ample fortune, at any rate of an independence sufficient to 
 justify him in carrying out to the full his own instinctive inclinations. 
 He at once started upon an educational tour, as an art student, through 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 351 
 
 the principal galleries of the European continent. Pausing for a while in 
 those travels for the more careful prosecution of his studies at Rome 
 Thackeray loitered "on at his leisure among the academies of Italy and 
 Germany. Thither, indeed, while yet a minor, he had found his way, 
 pencil in hand, into the midst of the refined society of Weimar — then, in 
 1831, still recognised as the intellectual capital of the whole Teutonic 
 confederation, 
 
 " At nineteen his artistic powers, like those of Olive Newcome, were 
 chiefly remarkable for the extravagant and rapid drollery of his quaintly 
 scribbled caricatures — comical sketches of situation and character, dashed 
 off in pen and ink, currente calamo, for the delighted amusement of his 
 acquaintances. "Among the English who lived in Weimar during those 
 days," writes Mr. Lewes, in his masterly "Life of Goethe" (book vii., 
 chap. 8, p. 553), " was a youth whose name is now carried in triumph 
 wherever English hterature is cherished — I allude to William Makepeace 
 Thackeray : " the biographer adding, " and Weimar albums still display 
 with pride the caricatures which the young satirist sketched at that 
 period." Several of these bizarre scraps of pictorial fun were shown at 
 the time to Goethe, to the great author^s unspeakable amusement. And 
 at last there came the day, marked thenceforth with a white stone in the 
 calendar of the young Englishman, when the venerable German poet 
 gave audience to the caricaturist. The interview has happily been 
 described by Mr. Thackeray himself, in that charming letter, penned 
 nearly one quarter of a century after the occurrence it describes, dated 
 "London, i8th April, 1855," in which he recounts to Mr. Lewes the 
 circumstances of his converse with the author of " Faust." Through that 
 epistle, as vividly as through the lorgnette of a stereoscope, we recognise 
 the stately, comely figure, robed in the long grey redingote, the blooming 
 features beaming radiantly above the white neckcloth, the little red 
 ribbon glowing in the button-hole. Vidi tanlutn / exclaims Thackeray, 
 exultingly, at the close of these delightful recollections. 
 
 " Several years passed thus pleasantly over the head of the young art 
 student, preparing himself with eager but desultory application for those 
 toils in the atelier which were never, as it happened, to begin for him in 
 earnest. How it eventually came to pass that, in the twenty-fifth year of 
 his age, art was permanently abandoned by him for letters, he himself 
 humorously related a few years since, upon the occasion of the annual 
 dinner given by the Royal Academy. There, within the walls of the 
 National Gallery, upon Saturday, the ist of May, 1858, Mr. Thackeray 
 afforded that anecdotal glimpse of his earlier life which was so especially 
 welcome to all who heard it as a fragmentary portion of his auto- 
 biography. It was then that, Mr. Charles Dickens having responded to 
 the toast of literature, Mr. Thackeray, whose name had likewise been 
 coupled with that toast complimentarily, supplemented the thanks of 
 Boz with this apt reminiscence : — " Had it not been," he said, " for the 
 direct act of my friend who has just sat down, I should most likely have 
 never been included in the toast which you have been pleased to drink ; 
 
352 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 and I should have tried to be, not a writer, but a painter or designer of 
 pictures. That was the object of my early ambition ; and I can re- 
 member when Mr. Dickens was a very young man, and had commenced 
 delighting the world with some charming humorous works, of which I 
 cannot mention the name, but which were coloured light green, and came 
 out once a month, that this young man wanted an artist to illustrate his 
 writings ; and I recollect walking up to his chambers with two or 
 three drawings in my hand, which, strange to say, he did not find 
 suitable. But for that unfortunate blight which came over my artistical 
 existence, it would have been my pride and my pleasure to have en- 
 deavoured one day to find a place on these walls for one of my per- 
 formances." Happily for us all, that wholesome blight did really descend 
 thus upon the pictorial leaves carried hopefully by William Thackeray to 
 the door of those chambers in Furnival's Inn, up that staircase thus 
 rendered doubly and delightfully classic ground, being at once the access 
 to the abode of the historian of Mr. Pickwick, and the true starting-point 
 in the literary career subsequently traversed by the author of " Vanity 
 Fair," " Esmond," and " The Newcomes." Shortly before this incident, 
 while he had been sojourning in the French capital, Mr. Thackeray had 
 been industriously, day after day, copying pictures in the gallery of the 
 Louvre. Thenceforth, however, by reason of the above-mentioned timely 
 corrective, the crayon was thrown aside for the goosequill. The art 
 student, forsaking the palette for the standish, settled down resolutely to 
 work out his destinies afresh, and with redoubled zest, in his new 
 capacity as a professional man of letters. 
 
 "According to a writer in the Edmburgh Review^ Mr. Thackeray 
 illustrated his literary career shortly after its commencement, somewhat 
 notably, by setting on foot and editing, with distinguished ability, a 
 weekly journal, arranged upon the plan of the Literary Gazette and 
 AthencBU7n. It is generally understood that his pen contributed to the 
 columns of the Times newspaper, during the editing of that greatest of 
 all London journals (it might be said, of all journals in the wide world) 
 by Thomas Barnes, the first of all London journalists. His earliest 
 settled engagement, however, upon the staff of any periodical dates, we 
 believe, from the September of 1836, the very year during which the first 
 great humorous novel by Boz was brought to its triumphant termination. 
 The rejection of certain proffered embellishments, for which work, we 
 have seen, had suddenly, during the course of its periodical issue, driven 
 Thackeray from art to literature. Towards the close of that year there 
 was commenced, in London, a daily newspaper called the Cojistitutional. 
 Mr. Thackeray's step-father occupied from the outset a prominent position 
 in the direction of the establishment. Vanishing though this journal 
 did from the world of letters within a few months after the date of its 
 inauguration, it is interesting to remember the names inscribed upon the 
 catologue of the contributors. Douglas Jerrold, then fresh from the 
 glories of " Black-eyed Susan," was the theatrical critic. Laman Blan- 
 chard filled the Rhadamanthine chair as the literary reviewer. Dudley 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 353 
 
 Costello wrote the foreign articles. W. M. Thackeray, taking up his 
 position anew in the gay French capital, efficiently discharged, during 
 the existence of the newspaper, the congenial duties devolving upon him 
 in his official capacity as its Paris correspondent." 
 
 Henceforth Thackeray for many years worked in the ranks of 
 periodical literature— but chiefly in Eraser's Magazine. In Maclise's 
 celebrated cartoon of the Fraser writers at the frequent banquets that 
 were held at 212, Regent Street, he appears a young man not in the fore- 
 most rank, and he is between Churchill and Percival Bankes, and 
 appears to be eyeing Jordan and Lockhart, who are taking wine together, 
 in sublime unmindfulness of editor Maguinn, who is " on his legs." Indeed, 
 it is remarkable that not one among all this " Best of all Good Company " 
 is paying the least attention to the chairman. Irving is talking to Mahony 
 (whose portrait strikingly resembles one I have of him taken a few 
 months before his death) ; D'Orsay, that politest of men, is chatting with 
 Allan Cunningham ; Fraser is having a serious conversation with Crofton 
 Croker ; and Coleridge has fairly turned his back upon the frolic. In 
 this company Thackeray first gained distinction as a writer. His early 
 progress has been nowhere so fully and authoritatively sketched as in 
 Mr. Kent's pages, to which I return :— 
 
 " His earliest distinction was gained in this manner through Eraser's 
 Magazine, for which he wrote month after month, year after year, papers 
 of the most miscellaneous character, some of them of essential evanes- 
 cence, others peculiarly worthy of preservation— essays upon art, reviews, 
 tales and social sketches, fantastic squibs and the quaintest satirical 
 disquisitions. Foremost among these grotesquely humorous contribu- 
 tions to Regina were the nine facetious communications entitled 
 *The Yellow-plush Correspondence.' These, if never printed in a 
 separate form in their own tongue, were at any rate eventually translated 
 into Dutch by Mark Philip Lindo ; and in that foreign guise were 
 published at Haarlem, in 1848— during the first outburst of the popu- 
 larity won for the author by the completion of * Vanity Fair,'— under 
 the novel title of * Gedenkschriften van den Herr Yellowplush.' The 
 November of 1837 witnessed the appearance of the earliest of those nine 
 eccentric and certainly very original instalments, the latest of them, 
 *Mr. Yellowplush's Ajew,' appearing in 'Regina' in the August follow- 
 ing. It is in that first prefatory chapter of his memorials that the re- 
 doubtable Charles James Harrington Fitzroy Plantagenet Yellowplush 
 observes of Captain Flupp— among other specimens of his quality, 
 specimens provocative only of what in Homeric phrase is defined as 
 inextinguishable laughter— that 'he is a huzza, but looks much more like' 
 a bravo.' Pointing us the way majestically with his gold-headed cane, 
 Chawles Jeames introduces us— we are ashamed to confess it— always 
 upon the broad grin, to Miss Shum's husband. He conducts us into 
 ' Foring Parts.' He refreshes us with a few * skimmings from the Diary 
 of George IV.'— skimmings, of course, at once yielding us access to the 
 ■ cream of cream.' He reveals to our scrutiny the various shuffles of 
 
354 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 ' Mr. Duceace at Paris ; ' obliges us with a trenchant exemplar of 
 * Diamond cut Diamond;' and ultimately brings us up short with a 
 pathetic 'Ajew,' as already intimated, from the lips of this preposterous 
 high priest of Flunkeydom. 
 
 " Between the commencement and the completion of the * Yellowplush 
 Correspondence ' occurred one month's omission — a hiatus auspiciously 
 filled up (under date June, 1838) by those 'strictures on pictures' in 
 Frasers Magazine which formed, we believe, the earliest acknowledged 
 effusion from the pen of Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh. The sequel to 
 this lecture upon the fine arts did not make its appearance in Regina 
 until another twelvemonth had elapsed, when, in June, 1839, Mr. A. 
 Titmarsh again put on the critical spectacles. Afterwards (it was in the 
 ensuing December) there was brought to light, through the same channel, 
 that ingenious ^Letter to Macgilp on the French School of Painting' 
 which, a few months later, formed part and parcel of our author's first 
 substantive publication. This, in truth, was no other than the ' Paris 
 Sketch-book, by Mr. Titmarsh ' — a couple of volumes composed of mis- 
 cellaneous papers, several entirely new, though the majority of them were 
 simply reprinted from the periodicals. Scattered through the letterpress 
 appeared here, for the first time, some of those fantastic little ' designs by 
 the author,' for which — etched on copper-plate, pencilled on wood blocks 
 — Mr. Thackeray's writing so often afterwards became whimsically re- 
 markable, — productions of art, some of them almost as funny, most of 
 them nearly as inartistic as even Tom Hood's pictorial comicalities. As 
 a draughtsman Mr. Thackeray employed the crayon and the needle 
 habitually with too careless a rapidity ever to effect more, by their 
 twittering movement over level box or varnished metal, than to tickle his 
 reader now and then into a cordial burst of laughter. With much of the 
 grotesque genius of the caricaturist, he had but little of his manipulative 
 dexterity — scarcely any indeed beyond that evidenced by the extraordinary 
 speed with which, literally in a twinkling, he produced those fantastic 
 embellishments, occasionally, it must be confessed, dashing off thus 
 rapidly on an initial letter chacterized by an effect the most exquisitely 
 ludicrous. Instance this one of the latter, that is an initial letter prefixed 
 to a chapter about midway in 'Vanity Fair,' in the which a small boy 
 and girl balance upon their tiptoes to a degree beyond the endurance of 
 any one's gravity — attaining an acme of absurdity upon their pumps 
 beyond the possibility of an eclipse by any similar imagining of Leech or 
 of Cruikshank. 
 
 " Reverting, however, from the embellishments — which are but the aits 
 interspersing the current of the letterpress — to the volumes of which 
 they are but the incidental, and for the most part indifferent illustrations, 
 we may observe that the work just now mentioned, as a whole, does not, 
 in one sense at least, affect the merit of originality, several of the tales 
 in it being avowedly borrowed from the French and reproduced in trans- 
 lations, chiefly remarkable for the ease, the freedom, and the sprightliness 
 of the paraphrase. The narrative, if so it can be termed, opens with a 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 355 
 
 pleasant * Invasion of France,* via Boulogne. It is agreeably inscribed 
 by Mr. Titmarsh to his tailor, M. Aretz, of the Rue Richelieu — a 
 gentleman who had offered him the loan of a 1,000-franc note, proving 
 himself thereby the very paragon of snips, and one eminently worthy of 
 the meed of this genial dedication. As an attestation of his quality as a 
 humorist, almost we had said before starting, there is that delightful 
 record by Mr. Thackeray of the English bull heard by him while they 
 were crossing the channel. Says the man at the wheel, * That's Ramsgit,' 
 says he, 'that there's Deal, that there's Dover, round that there pint, 
 only you can't see it.' As for the written bad pronunciation of French, 
 soon after we have landed upon the shores of Gaul, it is here altogether 
 as excruciatingly good in its way as Albert Smith's imitative spoken 
 pronunciation under the like circumstances." It is literally, as the 
 Egyptian Hall Polyglot Monologuist used to call it quaintly, " French 
 with the unmistakable English accent." Turning the pages of this " Paris 
 Sketch book," who can ever forget " The Painter's Bargain," — that story 
 of Simon Gambouge, where the invisible devil who has answered his 
 soliloquy of impieties, on being asked by Simon, " Where are you.?" says 
 in reply, and in the very smallest of voices, " S-q-u-e-e-z-e ! " And im- 
 mediately, on the nail being picked from a bladder of crimson lake in the 
 hand of the artist, a little imp spirts out on the palette,— a Uttle blood- 
 coloured imp of expanding dimensions ; as big at first, we are told, as a 
 tadpole, as a mouse, as a cat, when it jumps off the palette and turns a 
 somersault. Who, again, can easily lose of that other kindred historiette 
 of " The Devil's Wager," the irreverent legend about the soul of Sir 
 Roger de Rollo, such as ought, by rights, to have been chanted by 
 Thomas Ingoldsby, or that quaintest of episodes, " The Story of the Little 
 Poinsinet," another little Pickle as ugly as Thersites, and as deformed as 
 Asmodeus.? Here, too, in this curious melange ^o we not still bear in 
 vivid recollection the mock-heroic biography of Cartouche, the pick- 
 pocket ; the terrible history of Mary Ancel ; a leaf, stained with blood, 
 torn from the annals of the Revolution ; and the sorrowful memoirs of 
 Beatrice Merger, a poor French servant of all work — memoirs there 
 penned nearly twenty years ago by Thackeray, as simply and as touch- 
 ingly — as Lamartine subsequently related those of Genevieve. Here 
 likewise do we not haste awe-stricken to that frightful record of " A Gam- 
 bler's Death," a story with a horrible pathos in it, depicting in lurid 
 colours the career and decease of John Athwood, the gamester ? The 
 circumstantial account of a trial for murder related to us in this strange 
 miscellany, the extraordinary particulars of the case of " Sebastian 
 Peytal," might have awakened the enthusiasm, as it must certainly have 
 riveted the interest of Edgar Poe, that greatest of all masters of the 
 horrible and the mysterious in literature. It is in this chapter that, while 
 speaking of executions, Thackeray writes, " It is a fine grim pleasure that 
 we have in seeing a man killed." Effective phrases are by no means 
 sparsely scattered through this maiden work of the satirist and humorist, 
 in which he already gives evidence of his rare capacity in the double cha- 
 
356 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 racter. Passing under the shadow of the Egyptian obelisk in that superb 
 centralpoint of the French capital, and remembering as he looks about 
 him the scenes that have been witnessed in that really "finest site in 
 Europe," he wonders to himself drolly, why upon earth they call it the 
 Place de la Concorde? Looking then (in 1840) with an eye of keen 
 sagacity under the specious quietude that lasted for years afterwards, 
 until the arrival of one famous February, he declares of Louis Philippe, 
 with all the confidence of one far in advance of his time, that " no one 
 cares sixpence for him or his dynasty." Scanning with an impartial 
 glance the social and political problems of that time and country, he asks 
 gravely — while discoursing upon the treatment there and then of female 
 prisoners, — " Was it not a great stroke of the Legislature to superintend 
 the morals and the linen at once, and thus keep these poor creatures 
 continually mending ?" Descanting upon some of the glorious memories 
 of the Empire, he observes most happily of Murat, that he was a kind of 
 mixture of Dugueslin and Decrow — a felicitous comment, reminding one 
 of that celebrated witticism of Mirabeau in which the great Tribune 
 spoke of Lafayette by a double epithet as Cromwell-Grandison. 
 
 " One of the most delightful portions of this " Paris Sketch-book " is one 
 glorious critical chapter upon French caricature. It celebrates befittingly 
 the genius of Philippon and Daumier, the rival artists of the Charivari. 
 It relates, among other things, how they in their time have immortalized 
 through their ineffably ridiculous lithographs the knaveries of Robert 
 Macaire, and of poor dear stupid Bertrand, the perpetual accomplice of 
 that most clever and ragged of rapscallions. Philippon it was, by the 
 way, especially, who assisted so very materially with the point of his 
 wicked lead pencil in bringing about eventually the third (and let us 
 hope final) French revolution. He assisted thus in preparing for it, by 
 discovering in regard to the citizen king that, as the Arab exclaims with 
 disgust in the ballad of Bon Gualther, " his head is like a pear." And 
 there— thanks to Phihppon— week after week that pear dangled and 
 mellowed among the leaves of the Charivari ; until at length, in Napo- 
 leonic phrase, the pear, being ripe, fell from its high estate at the first 
 breeze of the February revolution. 
 
 "Throughout these initial volumes of his, however, Thackeray is especially 
 bounteous in regart to art. He himself was just fresh from it ; he was yet 
 great upon it ; it was still in a manner his hobby in retrospect. Writing upon 
 this theme to a certain extent as an ex-artist, ex cathedra, he by no means 
 as an art critic lectures us even into the merest momentary notion of his 
 infallibility. We differ from him in his opinions, we dissent from his con- 
 clusions, we recoil when he blasphemes Raphael, the divinest of all painters ; 
 actually (at page 156, vol. I.) designating as " donkeys" those who do not 
 accord to him, in the flagrant heresy, an implicit agreement. Yet, for the 
 most part, when gossiping upon art topics, Mr. Titmarsh is peculiarly de- 
 lightful ; he is then, beyond a doubt, especially amusing. Protesting against 
 the long nightmare of French classicism, he designates it " a classicism in- 
 spired by rouge, gas lamps, and a few lines in Lempriere." But exulting later 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 357 
 
 on over the downfall of the popularity of Davidism and classicism, he 
 cries out exultingly, " Classicism is dead ! Sir John Froissart has taken 
 Dr. Lempriere by the nose and reigns sovereign." While enunciating 
 earnestly enough his preference for landscapes, he observes, after the 
 irresistible manner of Leigh Hunt, " Fancy living in a room with David's 
 sans culotte Leonidas staring perpetually in your face ! " His sense of the 
 true sublime in art, however, is profound and thorough. If he reviles 
 Raphael, he pronounces the apotheosis of Buonarotti. Speaking of the 
 sculpturesque masterpiece of that colossal intellect as "frightfully 
 majestic," he adds, " I would not like to be left in a room alone with 
 the Moses ; " wondering afterwards, in so many words, that Michael 
 Angelo wis not " scorched up" by the fire of his genius like Semele by 
 Jupiter. By a pleasant conceit he likens Watteau to Champagne, Claude 
 Lorraine to Chateau Margaux, and Poussin to a draught of hot blood ; 
 remarking, in regard to the last-mentioned, " I don't like indulging in 
 such tremendous drink." Then, taking his reader by the button-hole, 
 " Confess, now," says he, " how many times you have read Beranger and 
 how many Milton.'* If you go to the 'Star and Garter,' don't you grow 
 sick of that vast luscious landscape, and long for the sight of a couple of 
 cows, or a donkey, and a few yards of common ?" Yet, loving Bdranger 
 thus entirely, he is, nevertheless, in these very volumes but indifferently 
 successful in his attempted imitations of the master song-writer. In- 
 stance this, his versions of Le Roi d'Yvetot, Le Grimer, and Roger Bon- 
 temps, in which, as he himself observes so happily of translations, 
 " the flavour and sparkle have evaporated in the decanting." If feeble, 
 however, in his insular echo of those glorious chansons^ he is admirably 
 bold, vigorous, and discriminative in his criticisms upon another and a 
 very different branch of French literature, — his masterly survey, we 
 mean, of one or two species of prose fiction, then, and some of them still 
 popular among our Gallic neighbours. Herewith he puts forward an 
 earnest plea for romances in general, all unconscious of some he himself 
 was to write in the hereafter, exclaiming derisively to those sedate big- 
 wigs who avowedly despise novels, '' Go and bob for triangles from the 
 Pons Asinorum ! " 
 
 " Incomparably the happiest evidences ever given of his capacity as a 
 reviewer of novels and novelists are those afforded through his searching 
 and scornful satire upon George Sand (otherwise Madame Dudevant) and 
 the New Apocalypse. One after another he subjects to the inexorable 
 scrutiny of common sense the various masterpieces of that intellectual 
 hermaphrodite, selecting each in turn as though it were some glittering 
 reptile pinned down upon the page, and placed under the lens of the 
 critical microscope. " Indiana," — directly attacking marriage as a reli- 
 gious and social institution ! " Valentine,"— advocating an amiable 
 licence in all things for young men and young maidens ! " Lelia ! '' — what 
 does he call it .? — a regular topsyturvyfication of morality, or thieves' and 
 prostitutes' apotheosis ! Finally, " Spiration," — the religious, or rather, 
 ethical, manifesto of George Sand, in which that epicene prophet boldly 
 
358 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 declares for Pantheism ! Here it is that, in words worthy of the then 
 unrecognised genius within him — words as noble in their eloquence as 
 any to which his pen ever afterwards gave expression — Thackeray breaks 
 forth at last in this cry of reverent and burning indignation : — " O awful, 
 awful name of God 1 Light unbearable ! Mystery unfathomable ! Vast- 
 ness immeasurable ! Who are these who come forward to explain the 
 mystery, and gaze unblinking into the depths of the light, and measure 
 the immeasurable vastness to a hair? O name that God's people of old 
 did fear to utter ! O light that God's prophet would have perished had 
 he seen ! Who are these that are now so familiar with it ?" It is no 
 mere professional jester, observe, who talks to us thus from the " Paris 
 Sketch book," but, on the contrary, an earnest thinker — one who was 
 already scanning the philosophy of life with a clear and comprehensive 
 intelligence. 
 
 " Our examination of these earliest volumes from the hand of Mr. 
 Thackeray has been thus minute and lengthened intentionally. The 
 production is, doubtless, little more in itself than a careless prelude to all 
 his more highly elaborated after performances. Yet it is a prelude, we 
 cannot but think, in which the gamut of the hitherto untouched organ 
 was sounded — however carelessly — from the treble to the diapason. As 
 such, it appears to us not uninteresting to recall some of those prefatory 
 trills and roulades, some of those forgotten chords and harmonies, thus 
 distinctly to remembrance. 
 
 "The following year, 1841, witnessed Mr. Titmarsh's reappearance 
 before the reviewers, bearing in his hand this time, however, only a 
 miniature volume, in which he recounted in three letters, addressed to 
 Miss Smith, of London, the incidents accompanying the obsequies fa- 
 mous thenceforth in history as " The Second Funeral of Napoleon." It 
 was a timely effusion enough — not by any means one in the ordinary 
 acceptation of the phrase A propos de boths, being, in point of fact, literally 
 d propos io the celebrated jack-boots of the Little Corporal! boots, by 
 the way, far beyond the seven-leagued boots of the old nursery tale, — 
 having traversed kingdoms and empires during the wearer's lifetime in 
 strides preternaturally gigantesque, and now, after death, carrying him at 
 one stride from Slane's Valley, under the shadow of the willows of St. 
 Helena, to his place of final and imperial sepulture under the dome of 
 the Invalides. 
 
 "Although Mr. Titmarsh*is a true Briton, and therefore appears to have 
 felt somehow constrained to look with an eye askance upon the pageant 
 he has recently been witnessing, he cannot help blurting out, once in a 
 way, an indication of hero-worship worthy of a true Bonapartist. Re- 
 lating the historic fact, how the old soldiers and the villagers walked 
 miles upon miles across country to the borders of the Seine, in order that 
 they might see the boat pass by with its twinkling chapelle ardente; and 
 how those veterans and peasants there knelt down on the banks of the 
 river and prayed with streaming eyes for the repose of the soul of the 
 emperor and king Napoleon, Thackeray cannot help exclaiming, " Some- 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 359 
 
 tiling great and good must have been in this man ; something loving and 
 kindly, that has kept his name so cherished in the popular memory, and 
 gained him such lasting reverence and affection." Yet, for all that, the 
 letters are written in a sardonic spirit throughout ; even from the com- 
 mencement of the first epistle, in which there is sarcastic talk about that 
 veritable banyan tree, spreading and dropping tendrils down and taking 
 fresh root, and expanding into a wider and yet wider forest perpetually — 
 the Humbug Plant ! Nay, so little is the enthusiasm of the writer kindled 
 by the spectacle at which he is assisting, so feebly is his record of it 
 coloured with anything like infatuation, so keen a regard still does he 
 preserve for the ludicrous in the midst of the ceremonial of the rein- 
 terment, that he there makes that most ridiculous mention of the signal- 
 cry uttered by the Commandant of the National Guard— the signal that, 
 reverberating in the silence of the sacred edifice, sounded in Mr. Tit- 
 marsh's profane ears like nothing less supremely absurd than " Harrum — 
 Hump !" Yet, in expiation, so to speak, of what might seem but flippant 
 in the eyes of another even than an imperialist, there is appended to the 
 prose narrative of the Second Funeral, the poetic " Chronicle of the 
 Drum," a ballad history recounting the warlike glories of France from the 
 
 days of the great Cond^ to those of the greater Napoleon, — 
 
 * 
 
 The story of two hundred years 
 Writ on the parchment of a drum." 
 
 "It is appropriately chanted — this stirring war-song— by the lips of the 
 veteran Pierre, one of the Emperor's old guardsmen. As the grizzled 
 warrior sings to us, — 
 
 "This cross, 'twas the Emperor gave it, 
 (God bless him !) it covers a blow ; 
 I had it at Austerlitz fight, 
 As I beat my drum in the snow." 
 
 "We needs must listen to the close ; we are under the glamour of an eye 
 as glittering as that of the Ancient Mariner. Altogether, this ditty is, 
 perhaps, the best sustained among the lyrical efforts of Mr. Thackeray. 
 And although it might with truth be described as also one of the most 
 successful, it is far from being our own peculiar favourite. Better than 
 this that charming reminiscence of the Temple, " The Cane-bottomed 
 Chair;" trotting off with,— • 
 
 *'In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars. 
 And a ragged old jacket, perfumed with cigars ; 
 Away from the world, with its toils and its cares, 
 I've a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs." 
 
 Most beautiful that homely realm of day-dreams, because there, in the 
 embrace of that old cane-bottomed chair, Fanny one morning" sat en- 
 throned so bewitchingly, — 
 
36o THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 ** It was but a moment she sat in this place, 
 She'd a scarf on her neck, and a smile on her face ; 
 A smile on her face, and a rose in her hair, 
 And she sate there and bloomed in my cane-bottomed chair." 
 
 Better to us than that roaring blood-bespattered " Chronicle of the 
 Drum," the delectable souvenier of Paris life preserved to us in " The 
 ballad of Bonillabaisse." — 
 
 ** When first I saw ye, cari heoghi, 
 I'd scarce a beard upon my face ; 
 And now a grizzled, grim old fogy, 
 I sit and wait for Bonillabaisse. " 
 
 Better, ah, how immeasurably better the cordial hand-grasp of each 
 line of " The Mahogany Tree " : — 
 
 •' Here let us sport. 
 Boys as we sit. 
 Laughter and wit 
 Flashing so free. 
 Life is but short — 
 When we are gone, 
 Let them sing on 
 Round the old tree." 
 
 Still sing on with us, warm heart, large heart, and gentle — 
 
 '* Evenings we knew 
 Happy as this ; 
 Faces we miss 
 Pleasant to see, 
 Kind hearts and true. 
 Gentle and just, 
 Peace to your dust, 
 
 We sing round the tree." 
 
 Surely this is the dear old song of home for us all. As such we prize 
 it, as such we love it. This, if we must perforce make choice from 
 among them, we may perhaps select as among all the lyrics of Thackeray 
 own own especial favourite." 
 
 I, who have heard Thackeray sing his songs in his happy moments — his 
 "Reverend Doctor Luther" among them— can hardly say that it was 
 not his best. " The Mahogany Tree," as Horace Mayhew sang it in his 
 early time, was the most dehghtful rendering of it I can call to mind. 
 Let us now turn to Mr. Kent's rapid and finely critical description of 
 Thackeray's best and more important work : — 
 
 " Although our writer during the first lustre of his career as a man of 
 letters had given frequent evidence of his abilities, he had done so for the 
 most part merely with the average brilliancy of a magazine contributor 
 
A DAY WITH W. iM. THACKERAY. 361 
 
 and a newspaper correspondent. His wit had sparkled hitherto only in 
 fitful and momentary scintillations. His 7nktier seemed to be simply the 
 facetious ; his mission, to crack jokes anonymously. We question very 
 much whether he himself had any confidence whatever, even until a long 
 while afterwards, in his own capacity to realize, however remotely in the 
 hereafter, what must, in spite of his own diffidence and self-depreciation, 
 have coloured at intervals the day-dream of his ambition ; namely, the 
 hope of taking first rank among the great masters of English Hterature. 
 Employing a grotesque image, that may yet not inaptly express his own 
 unconsciousness of his power at the outset of his career, and of the mar- 
 vellous capabilities of the magical little instrument in his hand, he might 
 be described as merely whistling and blowing catcalls, where he was ulti- 
 mately to breathe the music of a pure and original genius — through the 
 trivial orifice of a quill, which, at the touch of the lip of genius, becomes, 
 more resonantly than the golden horn of Clio, the trumpet of im- 
 mortality. Added to which, he was talking so long under masks, in 
 feigned accents, that we were without the opportunity even of detecting 
 the depth or the sweetness of his own natural intonations. Hushed at 
 last the guttural croakings of the Fat Contributor, the shrill but variable 
 treble of Spec, and Snob, and divers other whimsical minor individualities 
 — abandoned at length (with a sigh) what he himself rapturously desig- 
 nates "that peculiar, unspellable, inimitable, flunkified pronunciation," 
 with which Whatdy'ecallum, in Mr. T's. own tragic record of Gray's 
 dinner (chops and roly-poly pudding) to Goldmore, asks the latter 
 " Whawt toim will you please have the cage^ sir " — then, at length, but not 
 sooner, we could hear the tears in the voice of Thackeray. 
 
 Beyond any doubt whatever, the earliest indication of the real strength 
 and scope of his rare gifts as a writer, both of humour and of sensibility, 
 was afforded through that fantastic narrative, " The History of Samuel 
 Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond," a story begun in Eraser's 
 Magazine towards the end of 1841, the first instalment of the thirteen 
 chapters appearing in the number for September. It was not until eight 
 years afterwards — when the writer had sprung at last by a single bound 
 into a recognized popularity — that the tale of " The Hoggarty Diamond '' 
 was placed substantially before us as a separate publication. Yet the 
 charms of the little fiction, the exquisite merits scattered up and down it, 
 were recognized by the more observing almost immediately upon its 
 periodical issue, even within the first quarter from the date of its com- 
 mencement. A letter of John Stirling's — affording proof positive of this 
 early appreciation — a letter addressed by Stirling to his mother, under 
 date December nth, 1841, may be found in evidence of what we are here 
 saying, in Mr. Carlyle's Life of that thunderer among London journalists. 
 " I have seen no new book," writes Stirling in this epistle; but he adds 
 immediately, " I have got hold of the two first numbers of ' The Hoggarty 
 Diamond,' and read them with extreme delight. What is there better ? * 
 he asks, defiantly : ' What is there better in Fielding or Goldsmith ? The 
 man is a true genius ; and, with quiet and comfort, might produce master- 
 
 29 
 
362 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. . 
 
 pieces that would last as long as any we have, and delight millions of 
 unborn readers. There is more truth and nature in one of these papers 
 
 than in 's novels together " Who may possibly be, we are left 
 
 of course to conjecture. It is but a spiteful and jealous stab in the dark, 
 aimed with a pointless printer's dash at somebody whose identity we care 
 not to distinguish. But the appreciative panegyric of the friend then, and 
 for that matter during several years afterwards, altogether " unknown to 
 fame" beyond the radius of a genial literary coterie — that assuredly is as 
 explicit and as emphatic as any heartfelt and unstudied eulogium well 
 could be. Insomuch that Thomas Carlyle, after quoting those earnest 
 words of praise in his biography of " The Thunderer," is fain to add, by 
 way of comment (p. 287) : " Thackeray, always a close friend of the 
 Stirling House, will observe that this is dated 1841, and not 1851, and 
 have his own reflections on the matter." It is not, after all, very sur- 
 prising, however, to note the cordiality of those encomiastic and even 
 prophetic words of Stirling, if we come to turn over once more those 
 leaves of ready fun and frolic, of sportive sarcasm and unaffected ten- 
 derness, through which we hear so many strange but soon familiar voices ; 
 a few among them, at rare intervals, thrilling us with simple accents into 
 tears ; the majority provoking us to secret merriment, or, better still, 
 coming down upon us plump with sleeveless errands of laughter ! Don't 
 we yet listen delighted to the quavering tones of old Aunt Susy descanting 
 upon the great Mulcahy's shy deuver, " the p — the por — the por- 
 trait of her sainted Hoggarty," let into that dreadful machine, the locket 
 (" about the size of the lid of a shaving box"), upon the margin of which 
 blazes the great diamond, the heirloom of the Hoggarties ? Don't we still 
 watch with malicious satisfaction the convulsive features of Samuel, the 
 nephew, as he gulps down repeated doses of that abhorred black currant 
 wine, ideaHzed under the mellifluous title of Rosolio ? Have we not a 
 glance of the evil eye yet, flashed back from our indignation of old, in re- 
 gard to that sanctimonious Brough, the swindling manager of the West 
 Diddlesex Association ? Cannot we find one little morsel of fricasseed 
 toad left still to eat at the hospitable board of the Dowager Countess of 
 Drum ; or a single hair of the tuft upon the chin of that West-end Riquet, 
 the radiant Earl of Tiptoff, to hunt a brief while longer down the broad 
 sweep of Rotten Row, or round the curl of the Ring, or through the mazy 
 involutions of Belgravia? As for the minor characters, or more vulgar 
 entities introduced among the throng of those more elevated personages, 
 they may, it is true, be meaner studies for the artist, but they acquire more 
 distinctly under his hand the sharp outline and the warm tints of verisi- 
 militude. Instance, let] us say, that priggish young clerk. Bob Swinney, 
 with his " Sir, to you," when summoned to appear before his principal — 
 a sort of shadowy silhouette of the immortal Swiveller ! or good-natured 
 Gus Hoskins, the dim precursor of that delightful gent in Pendennis ! 
 It is, however, around the fresh, wholesome little womanly figure of dear 
 Miss Mary Smith that was, young Mrs. Samuel Titmarsh that is, and as 
 . such, through her husband, possessoress for the time being of the Great 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 363 
 
 Hoggarty Diamond, that the one real charm of the book revolves. She 
 is the central point of the magic circle, drawn here by his pen's tip in 
 this initial fiction of Mr. Thackeray. Listen to that crowning incident in 
 her home-life, as related by worthy Mrs. Stokes, the landlady, the inci- 
 dent occurring shortly after the death of the heroine's first-born, when 
 she hopes to extricate her husband from his pecuniary troubles, by 
 obtaining the post of wet-nurse in the Countess of Tiptoffs establishment. 
 *' ' Poor thing ! ' said my lady (who has just heard from the narrator the 
 twofold sorrows, driving the bereaved young mother in quest of this pe- 
 culiar and lowly situation) ; " Poor thing ! " said my lady. Mrs. Tit- 
 marsh did not speak, but kept looking at the baby ; and the great, 
 big grenadier of a Mrs. Honner (another applicant) looked angrily at her. 
 ' Poor thing ! ' says my lady, taking Mrs. T's. hand very kind, ' she 
 seems very young. ' How old are you, my dear ? " 'Five weeks and 
 two days ! ' says your wife, sobbing. Mrs. Honner burst into a laugh ; 
 but there was a tear in my lady's eyes, for she knew what the poor thing 
 was a-thinking of." Thus, in that thirteenth chapter of " The Hoggarty 
 Diamond," as surely as the Master Bet writ in the third scene of his third 
 act of Troilus and Cressida^ — 
 
 ** One touch of nature makes the whole world kin : " 
 
 the countess takes the ex-clerk's wife as a sister in her embrace, while the 
 reader's mind leaps at the same instant to the recognition of the unmis- 
 takeable sign-manual of genius— the expression of that sweet, and true, 
 and exquisite pathos, which is the inseparable and inevitable charac- 
 teristic of the world's great original humourists. 
 
 Already, within the year which witnessed towards its close the com- 
 mencement of this earliest of the serial storios of Mr. Thackeray, there 
 had been collected together from magazines or from manuscript two 
 volumes of his miscellaneous effusions, designated simply and explicitly 
 on the title page, " Comic. Tales and Sketches." Anonymously and 
 gradually the future novelist was stealing his way to public notice, under 
 all kinds of whimsical soubriquets, ^d through a great variety of popular 
 periodicals. Sometimes, for example, in that preposterous story of 
 " Little Spity," which many a reader of Cruikshank's Omnibus must about 
 this time have cried with laughing over, through the medium of an inde- 
 pendent specimen of broad humour, that tasked to its utmost even the 
 illustrative drollery of the pencil of that prince and paragon of carica- 
 turists. Beyond the original monthly outlet for Thackeray's satirical and 
 humourous fancies, namely, the double-columned pages of Eraser's 
 Magazine, there was started precisely at the right moment for his own 
 powers, as for those also of so many of his literary intimates and col- 
 laborateurs, that wonderful weekly repertory of fun ; in other words, that 
 delightful little hunchback, Pujich, whose jesting has had in its day 
 sufficient originality, and, for that matter, also sufficient nationality about 
 it to make us often regret exceedingly its never yet having dropped its 
 second title of the London Charivari, 
 
364 THE BEST OF, ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 By hebdomadal instalments, by monthly instalments ; through Punchy 
 through Fraser^ Thackeray by degrees numbered up so many good things, 
 that these of themselves when acknowledged — apart from his other more 
 elaborate writings — would have sufficed to secure for him in the end a 
 reputation. 
 
 For the most part these piecemeal effusions have never yet been issued 
 from the press of England in an independent form, save in their col- 
 lective form as portions of the four volumes of the author's " Miscellanies/' 
 Several among them, however, upon the opposite shores of the Atlantic 
 had long previously achieved the honours of separate publication. It was 
 thus with the sarcastic " Confessions of Fitzboodle," coupled with the record 
 of " Major Gahagan's Tremendous Adventures," that exaggeration even 
 upon the extravagance of the mendacious and redoubtable Baron Mun- 
 chausen. It was thus, too, with the quaint portraiture of " Men's Wives," 
 meaning the model wives of Frank Berry and Dennis Hoggarty. Thus, 
 likewise, had it been in America with regard to "A Shabby Genteel 
 Story " — eked out as a volume by several minor tales in the form of a 
 supplement— that cynical story which relates with pitiless particularity, 
 among other kindred incidents, the painful ceremonial of a shabby- 
 genteel dinner. Another of those unique American reprints, again, 
 was an agreeable little 07nni2im gatherum volume, embracing within the 
 compass of 306 pages, i6mo, "Punch's Prize Novelists," "The Fat Con- 
 tributor," and " Travels in London," — all these thus reprinted together 
 being announced upon that New York title-page as "By W. M. 
 Thackeray," the earliest revelation of which name in authorship, if we 
 remember rightly, occurred, however, in our own country in connection 
 with a work now requiring to be particularized. It was a revelation, 
 however, of that now famous name, not upon a title page, but at the close 
 of an epistolary dedication. The production itself savoured somewhat, 
 it must be confessed, of book-making. This was no other than " The 
 Irish Sketch Book," by Mr. Titmarsh, a sketch book, the letter-press of 
 which was disfigured here and there by a few of the author's prejudices, 
 and here and there also by a few more of his illustrations. The descrip- 
 tion therein attempted to be given of Ireland and the Irish is, of course, 
 by this time very much after date. It could hardly be expected, 
 therefore, to bear much resemblance to what Ireland and the Irish 
 actually are to our own present knowledge. But viewing the sister island 
 retrospectively, as it undoubtedly was when the pencillings of Mr. Tit- 
 marsh were but first freshly jotted down upon the leaves of his Sketch 
 Book, the limning is not by any means so much the reflective limning of 
 a faithful portraiture, as it is one characterized by the bizarre distortions 
 of the veritable caricature. It is a hastily-finished picture — painted in 
 distemper. The general tone of it might be most aptly described as sad- 
 coloured. Viewing it in its own ostensible character as a sketch-book, 
 the effect produced was rather dispiriting and monotonous. The outlines 
 were in Indian ink, and the shading neutral-tinted. So undisguisedly is 
 it in parts an exemplar of the merest book making, that the commence- 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 365 
 
 ment of it is really little more than a contrasting reprint from the liberal 
 Catholic Morning Register^ and from the independent Conservative 
 Saunders' News Letter. The dedicatory epistle, at the close of which 
 Mr. Thackeray here for the first time plucked off for a moment the comic 
 mask of Titmarsh, revealing under that facetious pseudonym his own 
 earnest individuality, was addressed in the genial spirit of a frank and 
 cordial friendship to Charles Lever, then editor of the Dublin University 
 Magazine. " Harry Lorrequer," quoth the first sentence of the letter, 
 *' needs no complimenting in a dedication ; and " continues the writer, 
 with an exemplary affectation of bashfulness, " I would not venture to 
 inscribe this volume to the editor of the Dublin University Magazine, 
 who, I fear, must disapprove of a great deal which it contains. But," he 
 adds— and the sarcasm lurking in the words that follow seems to drop 
 more befittingly from the searing steel pen of W. M. Thackeray than from 
 the playfully twittering goose-quill of M. A. Titmarsh — "allow me," he 
 writes, " to dedicate my book to a good Irishman, the hearty charity of 
 whose visionary red-coats some substantial personages in black might 
 imitate to advantage." The ingredients in the ink thus trailed across 
 the paper as far back as the twenty-seventh of April, 1843, from the point 
 of that iron stylus, for long afterwards lost none of their poignant efficacy, 
 either in sparkle or in bitterness. The caustic for years still bit ; the 
 phosphorus still glimmered out in luminous scintillations. 
 
 That our English traveller carries with him everywhere through Ireland 
 a microscopic eye for spots and blemishes, he indicates whimsically 
 enough at the very outset. He has scarcely landed at Kingstown, when 
 wandering through the streets he recognises nothing more vividly than its 
 " shabby milliners and tailors, with fly-blown prints of old fashions," — 
 peculiarities, of course, altogether invisible in the suburban districts of 
 London and Westminster. Following no settled plans in his pere- 
 grinations, Mr. Thackeray allow his narrative to meander in the track of 
 his footprints hither and thither discursively as the whim prompts ; or, 
 what is yet more potent with your pleasure tourist— the weather. "A 
 Summer's Day in Dublin," agreeably depicted, is followed by a true 
 Cockney's description of " A Country House in Kildare." And so onward 
 by the clattering car from Carlow to Waterford ! Occasionally, the 
 future dreaded cynic of all such scribes as affect to clamber into the 
 pulpit, and to talk there didactically ex cathedra, cannot himself resist a 
 momentary impulse to write as it were prepense^ in the midst of his 
 waggeries, up to some high moral purpose, to the championship of some 
 great social or political innovation. Here again, for example, as already 
 in " The Paris Sketch Book," we find him advocating upon principle, and 
 from the depth of his own humane convictions, the absolute remission of 
 the supreme penalty of capital punishment. Sometimes, too, the keen- 
 witted ex-artist turned bookman gives evidence of his capacity, let us say, 
 to take the measurement of an agricultural district by a better standard 
 than the breadth of his ruler or the length of his mahlstick. Thus, so 
 many long years ago, he estimates with shrewd discernment at its right 
 
366 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 value, the then new and almost untried manure of guano, as compared 
 with bone dust or with Murray's composition — acknowledging (Vol. 1. 
 p. 57) that " the bone-dust run guano very hard," but that the " compo- 
 sition w^s clearly distanced." At intervals, Mr. Titmarsh still contrives 
 by a single felicitous epithet to hit off in a twinkling a whole vivid de- 
 scription : as where, upon crossing the Suir, he says they " went over the 
 thundering old wooden bridge to Waterford." Is there not a glimpse, 
 too, of the mannerism of that quiet humour with which we afterwards 
 became so perfectly well acquainted, but that then was so new to us all, 
 where he describes that house in Cork with " a fine tester bed in the 
 best room, where my lady might catch cold in state in the midst of 
 yawning chimneys ?" Better still, is there not a premonitory flavour — 
 something like that which Count Xavier de Maistre alludes to in his de- 
 lightful "Journey Round my Room" (Ch. 42), where he writes, "It is 
 thus that one experiences a pleasant foretaste of acid when one cuts a 
 lemon,"— is there not a foretaste here of the " Lectures upon the English 
 Humourists" often years afterwards, where in this " Irish Sketch Book" 
 (Vol. I. p. 24), he muses over that mask of Swift's dead face preserved in 
 Trinity College, wondering over those painful, almost awful, lineaments 
 of Dean Jonathan — " the tall forehead fallen away in a ruin, the mouth 
 settled in a hideous, vacant smile ? " Best of all, however, in these two 
 earlier volumes from the hand of Thackeray, as an unmistakeable fore- 
 shadowing of his veritable presence as later on revealed in its actual 
 proportions— best of all, as such, is that little incidental mention here 
 (Ch. VI.) in the description given ofthe Ursuline Convent, at Blackrock, 
 of the nun guiding him proudly among the " little collection of gim- 
 cracks," dignified with the title of museum among the sisterhood. As he 
 recalls to recollection how the young nun went prattling on before him, 
 leading him hither and thither, "like a child showing her toys," Mr. 
 Thackeray asks his reader, in words of infinite tenderness — asks his 
 reader in a voice afterwards thrilling familiarly to the hearts of many 
 hundreds of thousands — " What strange mixture of pity and pleasure is 
 it which comes over you sometimes, when a child takes you by the hand 
 and leads you up solemnly to some little treasure of its own— a feather, 
 or a string of glass beads ? I declare I have looked at such," he adds, 
 "with more delight than at diamonds, and felt the same sort of soft 
 wonder examining the nun's little treasure-chamber." It is but a casual 
 fragment, this; from Mr. Titmarsh's "Irish Sketch Book," but it is a 
 thought expressed in words not unworthy of the author later on of 
 " Esmond " and " The Newcomes." 
 
 The following year, 1844, witnessed the production by Mr. Thackeray 
 of another serial tale, issued still anonymously, however, though this time 
 under another no7f2 de plujne, through the pages of Fraser^s Magazine. 
 The narrative itself was entitled " The Luck of Barry Lyndon," the writer 
 of it assuming to be one George Fitzboodle. It afterwards achieved the 
 honour of a separate reprint both at Paris and at New York, though at 
 home it has merely been republished, we believe, as an integral portion of 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 367 
 
 the four volumes of Mr. Thackeray's collected " Miscellanies." Mean* 
 while the weekly quarto pages of Pimch had been affording the author of 
 " Barry Lyndon " more frequent and effective opportunities for the display 
 of his rare and original genius as a satirist — as the one destined to take 
 rank very speedily, by universal assent, as the master satirist of our gene- 
 ration. Yet acrid to the last degree of acridity, although he was already 
 demonstrating himself to be as a satirist, as a critic, Mr. Thackeray was 
 about this time frequently proving, as he had often proved before and as 
 he so often proved afterwards, genial to the utmost limits of geniality, 
 overflowing with a grateful, cordial, generous, enthusiastic appreciation. 
 This romance of the last century, " Barry Lyndon " to wit, had scarcely 
 been commenced — the first instalment of it appearing in January, 1844 — 
 when in the number of Fraser for the ensuing month of February there 
 came forth a kind of collective review, entitled "A Box of Novels." This 
 delectable paper, signed with the well-known initials, M. A. T., is still 
 noticeable, though never since reprinted, as a critical argument containing 
 within it one of the most exquisite tributes ever offered to the genius of 
 Charles Dickens apropos of that glorious " Christmas Carol" which not- 
 withstanding its brevity, we are are almost tempted to select from among 
 all the now voluminous writings of Boz as pre-eminently his master-piece. 
 Perhaps Charles Dickens has had no more ardent admirer, he certainly 
 never had any more unstinted panegyrist, than the very author whose 
 writings, during so many subsequent years, have been absurdly held up 
 by certain bungling enthusiasts in contrast to the works of Boz, with a 
 view to the depreciation of that delightful genius. Mr. Thackeray must 
 often, we doubt not, have been of all men about the first to laugh to very 
 scorn the conclusions thus arrived at by some of his more infatuated enco- 
 miasts. According to those eccentric logicians, when "Vanity Fair" 
 appeared " Pickwick" ceased to be ! The publication of " Pendennis " 
 rendered " David Copperfield " non-existent ! Nay, the caustic worldly 
 wit and wisdom of the anatomist of the snobs of England, according to 
 this newly discovered mode of reasoning, suddenly invested with a heinous 
 but nameless guilt those extraordinary powers, both pathetic and 
 humorous, which had previously won for Charles Dickens a popularity 
 that has never been surpassed, if it has ever been equalled, during his 
 own lifetime, by any one purely and simply a writer of imagination. Mr. 
 Thackeray in his time effectively illustrated his own vivid appreciation of 
 the distinct difference (a difference discernible, one might have thought, 
 at a glance) between his own powers, style, tendencies, idiosyncrasy, and 
 those of his great contemporary, where the former has related in one of 
 his charming colloquial discourses how his own children once upon a 
 time posed him with the query. Why he did not write a novel like 
 " Nicholas Nickleby.-*" It is, to our thinking, in the peculiar combina- 
 tion in Thackeray's genius— in the very pith and marrow of his genius — 
 of the distinctive and vividly contrasting attributes of the satirist and 
 humourist that his chief excellence lies. It is as if his pen alternately, at 
 his own variable whim and pleasure, dropped honey and vitriol. It is as 
 
368 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 if there were blent together in the nature of this one writer the sweetness 
 of Goldsmith and the withering and pitiless scorn of Swift— the bitterness 
 of satire, in its very intensity, mingled with humour the most genial, 
 humour with all its most graceful, overflowing and bewitching tenderness. 
 Admiration for the humourist, and admiration for the satirist-humourist of 
 our time, we would simply insist upon being in no way incompatible. The 
 appreciation of Thackeray does not necessarily imply the depreciation of 
 Dickens, or vice versa. There is room enough for all in the vacant 
 niches and upon the unoccupied pedfstals of the great Walhalla of Lite- 
 rature. To induct another worthy to his appropriate place of elevation, 
 there is no need to clear the way for him either with the spiteful pencil of 
 a Pasquin or with the blundering hammer of an iconoclast. How utterly 
 distasteful these ridiculous gibes directed against Dickens, with a view to 
 the glorification of Thackeray, must have been to Thackeray himself, any 
 one acquainted with Thackeray's miscellaneous writings may readily 
 enough conjecture, knowing thereby, as the reader of Thackeray does 
 full well, the latter's intense and ever tender admiration for the genius of 
 his great contemporary. Contenting ourselves with one solitary indica- 
 tion of this profound and affectionate appreciation, let us here recall to 
 recollection for a moment the musings of our satirist-humourist in his 
 delightful " Sketches and Travels in London," where he is startled by " the 
 melody of Horner's nose, as he lies asleep upon one of the sofas" of the 
 club-house library at the Polyanthus. " What is he reading ?" asks Mr. 
 Brown the traveller, otherwise Mr, Thackeray, the great rival novelist. 
 " Hah ! Fe?tdennis, No. VIL ; hum, let us pass on. Have you read 
 * David Copperfield,' by the way .'"' says he, turning round upon his reader 
 in a glow of unaffected delight. " How beautiful it is, how charmingly 
 fresh and simple ! In those admirable touches of tender humoirr — and I 
 should call humour. Bob, a mixture of love and wit — who can equal this 
 great genius ? There are little words and phrases in his books which are 
 like personal benefits to the reader. What a place it is to hold in the 
 affections of men ! What an awful responsibility hanging over a writer : 
 What man holding such a place, and knowing that his words go forth to 
 vast congregations of mankind,— to grown folks' — to their children, and 
 perhaps to their children's children, — but must think of his calling with a 
 solemn and humble heart ! May love and truth guide such a man always ! 
 It is an awful prayer : may Heaven further its fulfilment ! " Noble and 
 beautiful words surely, words before which should ever afterwards remain 
 dumb and confounded such as might yet meditate testifying their admira- 
 tion for Thackeray by depreciating Dickens—" that great genius" whose 
 writings Thackeray loved and honoured not less than any other man out 
 of the huge multitude of his contemporaries. An eulogium, by the way, 
 the impressive close of which Mr, Thackeray failed even then to recognise, 
 comprised within it an orison for his own guidance by the handmaids of 
 Providence. 
 
 Bv this cursory mention, however, of Mr. Brown's *' London Travels 
 and Sketches," we are inadvertently anticipating. Mr. Brown had been 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 369 
 
 preceded some five years by Mr. Snob, while Mr. Snob in his turn had 
 ;rod hard upon the heels, if he had not even jostled the elbows, of Mr. de 
 la Pluche. Each of them tripping jauntily, in turn as together, across the 
 conspicuous proscenium of Mr. Punch the manager — that pleasant little 
 gentleman (as Mr. Thackeray himself expressed it, long afterwards, 
 through a delightful paper in the Quarterly) with the florid nose and the 
 falsetto voice, the " slight dorsal irregularity " and the just faintly 
 perceptible ventral protuberance. "Jeames's Diary" was of course 
 a propos of that memorable railway mania which the Times by a single 
 " leader " — by a single phrase in a " leader" — brought one fine morning to 
 an abrupt conclusion ; " Chawles Jeames de la Pluche, Esq.," himself 
 shortly afterwards serving, by the potent agency of ridicule, to complete 
 the catastrophe. Nothing could well be more laughter-moving than the 
 mere orthography of those wondrous autobiographical memoranda of the 
 great archetype and representative-man of Flunkeydom. An anticipa- 
 tive relish of this is given in the very earUest of the entries, i.e. — " 3rd 
 January — Our Beer in the Suvnt's Hall so precious small at this 
 Christmas time, that I reely muss give warning." It was the " Book of 
 Snobs," nevertheless, that capped the climax of Mr. Thackeray's successes 
 as an anonymous contributor to the periodicals. It is not only the 
 happiest among all his many felicitous serial papers in " Punch," but, 
 beyond that, the most remarkable among all his Miscellanies. Upon this 
 wonderful instrument at once of torture and of execution, " The Snobs of 
 England " — here of the Million, there of the Upper Ten Thousand, — 
 were carefully hung, and drawn, and quartered by one who duffed him- 
 self, after the fashion of Tom Moore's Fadladeen at the very outset of his 
 labours (as torturer and executioner), " One of themselves." How he 
 trots them out here, one after another, in ridiculous procession ! Mr. 
 Punch's baton has slipped into his hands, and he deals about him with 
 it unmercifully. Down they go, turn by turn, one at a time, or half a 
 dozen of them together. Anybody comes in for it — everybody ; his own 
 knuckles even tingling from the recoil occasionally. Talking of the 
 imitation of the great as a weakness universally apparent, " Peacock's 
 feathers are stuck in the tails of most families," quoth he (p. 75), 
 " Scarce one of us domestic birds but imitates the lanky, pavonine strut, 
 and shrill, genteel scream." Sometimes the careless strokes dealt around 
 him by the comic censor, blight as visibly and instantaneously as a flare 
 of lightning. When pausing, for example, before one of the great houses 
 in Belgravia— one of those state mansions of " Vanity Fair," in reference 
 to which he observes afterwards to his throng of readers in the midst of 
 his noble masterpiece descriptive of it (chap, li., p. 449), " Dear brethren, 
 let us tremble before these august portals ! " so now previously in his 
 " Book of Snobs " (chap. vi. p. 24), halting for an instant in front of one 
 of these patrician dwellings,— saith he within himself, " Oh house, you are 
 inhabited ! — oh knocker, you are knocked at ! — oh undressed flunkey, 
 sunning your lazy calves as you lean against the iron railings, you are 
 paid !— by snobs !" And thereupon awfully selecting this same "tremendous 
 
370 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 thought," as he terms it, for immediate illustration, " Look," he exclaims 
 "at this grand house in the middle of the square. The Earl of Lough- 
 corrib lives there ; he has fifty thousand a-year. A dejeuner dansaitt gw^n 
 at his house last week cost, who knows how much ? The mere 
 flowers for the room and bouquets for the ladies cost four hundred pounds. 
 That man in drab trowsers coming crying down the steps, is a dun ; 
 Lord Loughcorrib has ruined him, and won't see him : that is his Lord- 
 ship, peeping through the blind of his study at him now. Go thy way, 
 Loughcorrib, thou art a Snob, a heartless pretender, a hypocrite of hospi- 
 tality, a rogue who passes forged notes upon society." Yet, directly after- 
 wards, the darkened face of the cynic dimples over with fun, as he depicts 
 with harmless railing the peculiarities of that wonderful portrait of 
 General Scraper — the picture representing the General (who, we are in- 
 formed, distinguished himself at Walcheren) " at a parlour window with 
 red curtains, in the distance a whirlwind in which cannon are firing off,"' 
 with other irresistibly ludicrous particulars. A translation of this witty 
 little book, more exquisitely provocative of merriment, in parts, even 
 than the original (by reason of its being a translation), has presented 
 " Z^j" Snobs d'Angleterre" to the wondering contemplation, no doubt, of 
 Monsieur and Madame, our dear French neighbours. It is worth looking 
 at, for a moment, this " traduction," by those who have the opportunity, 
 if only for the absurdity of the thing, in beholding "■ Les Snobs d^Angle- 
 terre^'' aforesaid, tricked out for the nonce, as it were, in French habili- 
 ments, straddling over the trottoirs, so to speak, in those marvellous 
 Hessian trousers plaited round the waist, the little dandified >^e^z perched 
 on the extreme top of the sturdy British cranium, Mr. Snob pausing, we 
 may suppose, when athirst, to moisten his lips at the leaden counter of 
 some small Parisian wine-shop, with one of those amazing little sips of 
 bitter nothing, the petits verges d^ absinthe ! 
 
 Prior to the apparition in Punch of either the " Book" or the " Diary," 
 Mr. Thackeray had packed his portmanteau and gone struggling off by the 
 Overland Route, as that voyage across the Mediterranean is, oddly enough, 
 designated, had gone struggling off to the East in a semi-official serio- 
 comic sort of a character, as Mr. P's Fat Contributor and Correspondent 
 Extraordinary. 
 
 The journey extended not only, as the title of its ultimate record inti- 
 mates, " From Cornhill to Cairo," but branched off in divers directions — 
 to Lisbon, to Athens, to Jerusalem, to Constantinople. 
 
 It was commenced in the August of 1844, this pleasant journey east- 
 wards, on board the P. and O. Company's steamer, the "Lady Mary Wood." 
 But it was not until more than a twelvemonth afterwards that the notes of 
 travel jotted down by Mr. Thackeray in transitu were published in a volume 
 brimmed full from rim to rim of its cover with sparkling facetiousness. 
 
 The traveller seems throughout never to have forgotten for an instant 
 the aim or drift of the whole enterprise. As the Fat Contributor, he 
 appears to imagine that he must be perpetually on the chuckle. Some- 
 times in the most incongruous and unseemly localities for a jest, he can 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 371 
 
 hardly see for laughing — he can hardly see, at least, that the ground he 
 treads on is holy ground, and that the awful sanctity of what he himself 
 once designates, even here in his jest-book, " the great murder of all," is 
 around him. The mixture of cynicism and scepticism with which he 
 passes by such hallowed regions as the place of the Holy Sepulchre, is 
 almost as offensive as that manifested by his brother Cantab, Mr. King- 
 lake, in his radiant but refrigerating " Eothen." He is nevertheless, in 
 spite of all this, awed for one brief interval into solemnity, by the iron 
 soil and the whole spectacle of branded sterility presented to view on all 
 sides both within and around the awful city of Jerusalem — describing as 
 " the most ghostly sight in the world " the blasted desolation of the wild 
 and rocky valley of Jehoshaphat. 
 
 It is as a professional y^r^^wr, or joke-master, however, that he travels 
 throughout the whole of this Oriental expedition ; although he humour- 
 ously depicts himself as landing in Egypt prepared to view everything 
 " with pyramidal wonder and hieroglyphic awe," he is, on the contrary, 
 perpetually looking at all around him with an especial eye for the detec- 
 tion of the ridiculous. He carries his London likings, moreover, with 
 him beyond the ends of Christendom. At Alexandria he acknowledges 
 to his having a Cockney preference for " Punch " over the Sphinx, as for 
 " Gahgnani " over the tombs of the Pharaohs. Scanned superciliously 
 through his English spectacles the Sultan's seraglio looks for all the 
 world " like Vauxhall in the day-time." And precisely as Mr. Dickens 
 startles us in his "Pictures from Italy," by declaring (with parenthetical hesi- 
 tation, and three notes of exclamation) that as he came in sight of the 
 Eternal City, '• it looked like — I am half afraid to write the word — like 
 London ! ! ! " so here, too, Mr. Thackeray surprises us by confessing the 
 disappointment with which he found Alexandria to be just like — South- 
 ampton ! Yet he has the appreciative glance of a painter for the ripe 
 and varied colouring of vast stretches of the southern and oriental 
 scenery. Looking up, entranced, into the sky over the market-place at 
 Cadiz he describes it as bluer and brighter than the best cobalt in the 
 paintboxes. And floating once more, in imagination, over the blue waters 
 of the Nile, his luminous page reflects thus gorgeously the sunrise he 
 then witnessed — " In the sky in the east," he writes, " was a streak of 
 greenish light, which widened and rose until it grew to be of an opal 
 colour, then orange, then, behold, the round red disk of the sun rose 
 flaming up above the horizon, till the waters blushed as he got up ; the 
 deck was all red ; the steersman gave his helm to another and prostrated 
 himself on the deck, and bowed his head eastward, and praised the 
 maker of the sun ; it shone on his white turban as he was kneeling, and 
 gilt up his bronze face, and sent his blue shadow over the glowing deck." 
 Yet directly afterwards, upon the very next page, all Mr. Thackeray has 
 to say about the pyramids is this : — " I confess, for my part, that the 
 pyramids are very big." While all that he can tell us about the desert 
 is, that it appeared to him "uncomfortable." Journeying onward in this 
 mood — in search, not like Dr. Syntax, of the picturesque, but of the 
 
372 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 droll — it must have been quite congenial to his humour to make his first 
 entrance into Grand Cairo in a race upon donkeys ! No wonder, with 
 this unwinking gaze everywhere in quest of the absurd, that when stopping 
 for a while at Ramleh, in the course of his advance in cavalcade towards 
 Jerusalem, he makes particular mention of the circumstance of his being 
 waited upon, by an Arab, ornamented about the nose with diachylon. 
 
 Several of his facetious phrases in the midst of this habitual jocularity 
 are, of course, it must be admitted, even by the veriest curmudgeon of a 
 reader, irresistibly ridiculous. What can be better than his mode of de- 
 fining the lethargic influence of the lovely climate at Rhodes — where he 
 depicts everybody there as being " idle with all their might ?" He seems 
 to walk, as it were, nervously upon tiptoe along the streets of Lisbon, 
 with secret qualms in regard to one particular historic recollection, de- 
 scribing the Portuguese capital as not smoked like London, but dusted 
 over, having "a dry, uncomfortable, earthquaky look." Surveying the 
 sham architecture of the Sultan's palace at Constantinople, he observes 
 comically that " most of the marble is wood ;" a remark about as oddly 
 ridiculous as that exclamation of one of those two absurd men in the 
 farce of " Box and Cox," the one who calls out indignantly over the grid- 
 iron, " Hallo ! my bacon 's a chop!" Almost immediately upon his setting 
 forth on this journey, as we have called it, in search, of the droll, Mr. 
 Thackeray must certainly be regarded as in luck ; for, scarcely has he 
 landed at Vigo, when we find himself and his companions suddenly ac- 
 costed thus by the Spanish mendicants : " I say, sir ! penny, sir ! I say 
 English ! tam your ays ! penny !" Then is it worth going all the way to 
 Byzantium to arrive at last at such a result as the Turkish bath, provocative 
 of that deliciously fantastic description, assuredly better than the most viva- 
 cious fragment to be culled from all Lady Mary Wortley Montague's " Cor. 
 respondence," that description of the true Turkish bath, in which Mr. 
 Thackeray declares that he was at last "drowned in lather" — protesting in 
 the mere spluttering recollection of it — "you can't see, the suds are frothing 
 over your eye-ball ; you can't hear, the soap is whizzing into your ears ; you 
 can't gasp for breath. Miss Mac Whirter's wig is down your throat, with half 
 a pailful of suds, in an instant — you are all soap." In a similar strain of gro- 
 tesque exaggeration, he submits to his reader his profound sense of the 
 hopeless decay of the Turkish Empire, by remarking that there, so to speak, 
 "the ready roasted meat trees may cry,'come and eat me,' every now and then 
 in a faint voice without any gravy in it, but the faithful begin to doubt about 
 the quality of the victuals." With what a preposterous gravity he descants, 
 with an air of tender interest, upon the merits of every one on board the 
 Lady Mary Wood — down even to " the cook with tattooed arms, sweating 
 among the saucepans of the galley, who used (with touching affection) to 
 send us locks of his hair in the soup." About as good in its way that, as the 
 mention made in another place, of the lazaretto for quarantine, where the 
 authorities are so attentive as to scent your letters with aromatic vinegar. 
 
 Conspicuous among the oddities in these descriptions of his, there is 
 that ludicrous record of the landing of the Bishop of Faro, with his lord- 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 373 
 
 ship's servant in yellow and blue livery, " like the Edinburgh Review ! '* 
 Or again, there is the particularly dry humour with which he undertakes 
 to delineate, in a few words, the prevailing characteristics of the Maltese 
 landscape, where, speaking of what may be called the country near Va- 
 letta, he says that " there the fields are rocks, and the hedges stones." 
 Occasionally his similies are hardly less poetical than they are fantastical 
 as when he quaintly talks of that pinnacle of the arched entrance to a 
 mosque at Cairo, as shooting up " like the most beautiful pirouette by 
 Taglioni." That he was at length beginning to feel something like hope 
 in himself and his goosequill, take this queer little running commentary 
 upon the twain at the close of these Oriental lucubrations. " This quill," 
 quoth he, " it comes of the wing of an humble domestic bird, who walks 
 a common, who talks a great deal (and hisses sometimes), who can't fly 
 far or high, and drops always very quickly, and whose unromantic end is 
 to be laid on a Michaelmas or Christmas table, and there to be discussed 
 for half-an-hour — let us hope with some relish." With so much relish 
 apparently (with all its abundant accompaniments of" sage " and "sauce ") 
 was it discussed in this instance, that. Mr. Thackeray upon six different 
 occasions afterwards catered directly for the English table at Christmas. 
 
 Taking down his old dusty paint-box from the shelf upon which it had 
 been so long lying, almost forgotten, certainly quite neglected — selecting 
 his brightest gamboge, his richest carmine, and his divinest ultramarine, 
 our dear modern Michael Angelo, him of the dumpling cheeks and circular 
 spectacles — Mr. Titmarsh for the nonce — came forth, to the delight of all 
 the boys and girls in the three kingdoms, during the winter of 1846—47, 
 with a little pink glazed quarto volume of funny letterpress and yet funnier 
 coloured illustrations, descriptive of '' Mrs. Perkins's Ball." Setting aside, 
 as the one solitary exception, that homfne farouche who may be regarded 
 as the exaggerated type of the model Irishman of your ultra-caricaturist, 
 the Mulligan of Ballimulligan — setting aside that one outrageous extra- 
 vagance, an Englishman's notion of an Irishman, about as like the 
 original as a Frenchman's notion of an Englishman, with his biftake 
 " bleeding," and his bouledogue " bandy-legged," and his steppare flying 
 the garter over park gates as an everyday pastime, and his Cott-tam inter- 
 larding of everyday conversation— with that one exception of the Mulligan 
 (proving the rule), the characters introduced into this entertaining 
 historiette were exact and literal limnings of people who had sat, or 
 walked, or sang, or danced to the author-artist for their portraiture. They 
 were literary and pictorial Daguerreotypes, in the imprinting of which 
 upon the pages of his Christmas book Mr. Thackeray had taken wit for 
 his iodine. He had turned the feather end of his goose-quill into a paint- 
 brush and had taken his pigments directly from the palette of nature. In 
 testimony of which it is only necessary to recall the merest sprinkling 
 from the motley groups crowding the drawing-rooms, staircases, and hall- 
 passage of Mrs. Perkins in our amused remembrance! From Herr 
 Spoff, breathing melody through his cornet-k-piston, to honest Grunsell, 
 the attendant greengrocer, draining bottles behind the screen ! From 
 
374 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 Master Perkins, busy amoncr the macaroons on the landing, to Mr. Flam, 
 tantalising the seven lovely Misses Bacon with " Gad ! how I wish I was 
 a dancing man '' upon the very brink of an expected invitation ! An 
 exact companion, externally, to this earliest of Mr. Titmarsh's half-dozen 
 Christmas books dropped from the press in the midst of the ensuing 
 year's festivities. -It was only a companion to it, however, in the manner 
 of its appearance — " Our Street" being really and truly for the most part 
 valueless, utterly valueless indeed, saving for a few among the illustrations, 
 " The Man in Possession " being obviously one of these happier hits with 
 the leaded pencil. But the best of them all, " The Lady whom Nobody 
 knew," flaunting in gay apparel down " Our Street," yet scorned by the 
 nurserymaids. A blither, merrier book than any yet, tickling us into 
 laughter, thus with crayon or quill-point twiddled between the finger and 
 thumb of M. A. Titmarsh, R.A., was the goodly volumette in which, 
 during the winter following, he introduced us to '* Dr. Birch and his Young 
 Friends." Who can forget those model boys of the model schoolmaster, 
 or the subtle touches of nature with which we get often at an instant to the 
 depths of their idiosyncrasies ? George Champion, the cock of the school, 
 for example, after the summing up of the distinguishing peculiarities of 
 whose beautiful, brave, and noble character our author propounds the 
 following delectable sentiment — '' I think that to be strong and able to 
 whop everybody would be the greatest of ail gifts." There is Duval the 
 pirate, too, in the record of whose predatory career it may be remembered 
 that we come, among other larcenous feats, upon one most impressive 
 incident where Jones Minimus, passing laden with tarts, after a slight 
 colloquy has the goods (that have been merely entrusted to him) con- 
 fiscated. Can anything, again, have a more comical truthfulness about it 
 than that touching example of " Briggs in Luck ? " " Enter the Knife 
 Boy — 'Hamper for Briggses?' Master Brown — ' Hurray, Tom Briggs! 
 ril lend you my knife / ' " But they are all of them capital, these photo- 
 graphs from the haunts of Hieroclesian Skolastikos ! From Mother 
 Ruggles, the tart, apple, and brandy-ball seller, up to (or down to — which 
 is it ?) the Honourable Plantagenet Gamut-Gamut, the idiot aristocrat ; 
 with all the intermediate throng — including among them Master Hewlett 
 (in bed) and Master Nightingale (in his shirt), upon the occasion of that 
 farcical scene in the dormitories ! Not forgetting the vera effigies of the 
 pugnacious Boxalls and dull Master Hulker, of Bullock the sharper and 
 Backhouse the pill-garlick — destined, this last mentioned, so very fre- 
 quently to lament, like Master Ingoldsby in the famous legend by the 
 Rev. Thomas Barham — 
 
 ' * Then he took me by the collar, 
 
 Cruel only to be kind, 
 
 And to my exceeding dolour 
 
 Gave me several slaps behind. " 
 Wonderfully life-like specimens, all of them are, of the academic inhabi- 
 tants of Rodwell Regis, those small inhabitants trembling under the rule 
 — rather, we should say, the fe-rule of energetic Dr. Birch, the swinge of 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 375 
 
 whose cane must have afforded so many of his pupils a lively notion of 
 the vigorously rounded development of the biceps muscle veiled under 
 the clerical broadcloth. 
 
 Singularly to the foregoing Christmas book were the two immediately 
 ensuing in annual succession. The first of these, " Rebecca and Rowcna/' 
 being in effect, as the second title designated it, "a romance upon 
 romance," partook of the obnoxious and irritating character of a delibe- 
 rate travesty, the wilful degradation of the beautiful to the ridiculous. 
 Insomuch was the travesty here, to our thinking, something quite intoler- 
 able, that even the piquant drollery of Richard Doyle, as the illustrator, 
 failed to propitiate us so far as to lure us even into momentary approbation. 
 Delectably humorous, certainly, was the little woodcut in the centre of the 
 ornamental cover of the volume, representing Master Motley, with palette 
 and brush, " painting the lily ! " But what possibly could in any way 
 redeem from the Malaprop penalty of " forfeiting our malevolence for 
 ever " that disgracefully laughable vignette upon the title page, portraying 
 Wamba as Clown, Isaac as Pantaloon, Wilfred as Harlequin, and 
 Rebecca as Columbine, — disposing the chief personages of Ivanhoe, in 
 fact, in the approved tableau preliminary to the Charivari, the hammer 
 and tongs, sausage-stealing, and red-hot poker brandishing, the comic 
 business, in short, as it is technically called, of your regular Christmas 
 pantomime ? Somewhat better than this " romance upon romance " was 
 the next "winter night's tale" from the hand of Mr. Titmarsh, "The 
 Kickleburys up the Rhine," descriptive for the most part of a season 
 passed by an English family, once upon a time, in that very beau ideal of 
 a German watering-place yclept Rougetnoirburg. It is chiefly memorable, 
 however, this little narrative, designed apparently for nothing more than 
 the pleasant wiling-away of a December evening, by reason of its having 
 elicited from the Times a savage review, intended, no doubt, to be crush- 
 ingly overwhelming. Hurled blindly at Mr. Thackeray, nevertheless it 
 somehow recoiled upon the critic like a boomerang. It goaded Mr. 
 Thackeray to a " retort polite," a rejoinder which is yet worthy of preser- 
 vation as among the happiest effusions of gall from the pen-point of the 
 hiaster satirist. " An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer," it was called ; 
 a mere little octavo pamphlet extending to the length, or rather the short- 
 ness, of some half-dozen leaves or so, yet, by turns, within this narrow 
 compass, dignified, ironical, contemptuous, sarcastic, bitter, derisive, 
 eloquent — flaying the reviewer from the lips downwards, and then steeping 
 him in the aquafortis of a scholarly and gentlemanly ridicule. Scarcely 
 a quarter of a year had well elapsed after this edifying literary one-two 
 between the Times and Thackeray, when — it was upon a certain May-day, 
 thenceforth to be held in popular remembrance — " The Thunderer," in 
 token of its magnanimous reconciliation with its eminent discomfiter, was 
 doing far better than merely chronicling small beer (or souring it) by 
 giving to publicity in its columns that harmonious " May-Day Ode " with 
 which Mr. Thackeray celebrated in graceful stanzas the inauguration, in 
 Hyde Park, of the W^orld's Exhibition of Art and Industry. 
 
376 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 Finally, completing the fairy circle of these Christmas phantasies by 
 Mr. A. Titmarsh, there appeared, not, however, until four seasons later, 
 the last of the little series, perhaps among them all the most delightful, 
 certainly the most fanciful, that pretty fire-side pantomime for great 
 and small children, " The Rose and the Ring," giving us the veracious 
 histories of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo. If for nothing else, it would 
 live daintily in our recollection to the music of the little girl's song, as she 
 sings, dancing to herself- in the wondrous garden — the sweetest little 
 lisping baby-song, surely, that great author ever penned, — 
 
 *' O what fun ! 
 Nice plum bun, 
 How I wis it never was done ! " 
 
 As it never will be let us all rest assured ! For that little girl, with her 
 song and her bun, like little Red Shoes in the fairy legend of the dear 
 Danish poet for all children, Hans Christian Andersen, will go on dancing 
 - "dance she will and dance she must," down to the very end of the chapter. 
 Already by this time the satirist-humourist had been in the enjoyment 
 during several years of a conspicuous popularity. It was immediately 
 after the appearance of the earliest of the little Christmas books here 
 particularized, that Michael Angelo Titmarsh suddenly, as it were, by a 
 single stride advanced from amidst the crowd of brilliant writers for the 
 periodicals, to a recognised place among the foremost of the great living 
 chiefs of our imaginative literature. He had served for ten years in the 
 ranks ; but all the while, like one of the true soldiers of the great Na- 
 poleon, he had been canying his marshal's baton in his knapsack. 
 " Vanity Fair " became at once a new starting point in his literary career, 
 and the most lasting trophy of his genius as a satirist-humourist. It is 
 understood to have been declined by one publisher, though happily the 
 Sibylline leaves, in this instance, were not diminished in number by that 
 obtuse rejection. The serial issue of the narrative began almost unno- 
 ticed. It was scarcely midway, however, in its course of month-by-month 
 publication, when throughout all the various literary circles of the metro- 
 polis it had become the theme of wondering and delighted conversation. 
 By the period of its completion in 1848, Mr. Thackeray's fame was 
 already securely established ; his name was enrolled forthwith, by right 
 of that one work, upon the list of our great English noveUsts ; he had 
 assumed his place at once, and permanently, in the inner throng of that 
 illustrious and beloved fraternity." 
 
 The reader is now in possession of the facts of Thackeray's literary 
 career, set forth in the tender and scholarly framing of Mr. Charles Kent. 
 Let him now turn to James Han way's fine literary estimate (already re- 
 ferred to) of our illustrious friend, which he published in the Edinburgh 
 Courant at the time of Thackeray's death : — 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 377 
 
 " Thackeray," Hannay says, " was still young and opulent when he 
 began to make the acquaintance of London men of letters. Certain it is, 
 that he lent— or in plainer English, gave— five hundred pounds to poor 
 old Maginn, when he was beaten in the battle of life, and like other 
 beaten soldiers made a prisoner — in the Fleet. With the generation 
 going out,— that of Lamb and Coleridge,— he had, we believe, no personal 
 acquaintance. Sydney Smith he met at a later time ; and he remem- 
 bered with satisfaction that something which he wrote about Hood gave 
 pleasure to that delicate humourist and poet in his last days. But his 
 first friends were the Fraserians, of whom Father Prout,— always his in- 
 timate,— and Carlyle,— always one of his most appreciating friends,— 
 survive. From reminiscences of the wilder lights in the Eraser constel- 
 lations were drawn the pictures of the queer fellows connected with 
 literature in ' Pendennis,'— Captain Shandon,— the ferocious Bludjer, 
 — stout old Tom Serjeant, — and so forth. Magazines in those days were 
 more brilliant than they are now, when they are haunted by the fear of 
 shocking the Fogy element in their circulation ; and the effect of their 
 greater freedom is seen in the buoyant, riant, and unrestrained comedy 
 of Thackeray's own earlier Eraser articles. * I suppose we all begin by 
 being too savage,' is the phrase of a letter which he wrote in 1849; 
 * / know one who did.' He was alluding here to the ' Yellowplush 
 Papers ' in particular, where living men were freely handled. This old, 
 wild satiric spirit it was which made him interrupt even the early chap- 
 ters of 'Vanity Fair,' by introducing a parody, which he could not resist, 
 of some contemporary novelists. In the last fifteen years of his life he 
 wrote under greater restraint, and with a sense of his graver responsi- 
 bilities as one of the leading men of letters of the country. But his satire 
 was never at any time malignant ; and the fine freedom of his early 
 writing developed his genius as the scenes of the arena developed the 
 athlete. He was writing for twelve or thirteen years, as a professional 
 author, before * Vanity Fair' made him really known to the world at 
 large. The best works of that epoch will be found in the Miscellanies^ 
 published by Bradbury and Evans in 1857. But there is much of his 
 writing buried in periodicals, some of which have been long dead. He 
 was connected with at least one failure, the Parthenon,— 2Si ill-omened 
 name borne after a long interval by another journal quite recently 
 defunct. He certainly contributed some things to the Ti7nes^ during 
 Barnes' editorship,— an article on Fielding amongst them, — a kind of work 
 for which he had no relish, and for which he believed himself to have no 
 turn. Eraser was the organ with which he was most successfully con- 
 nected till the days of his Punch engagement. It was indeed as a 
 magazinist that he educated himself for a novelist. With a playful re- 
 ference to his early and never-forgotten ambition to be an artist, he called 
 himself Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and published under that name, not 
 only articles but books. The * Paris Sketchbook,' the ' Second Funeral 
 of Napoleon' (comprising the 'Chronicle of a Drum), the 'Fatal Boots,' 
 the 'Hoggarty Diamond,' the 'Irish Sketchbook,' the 'Journey from 
 
 2 c 
 
378 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY, 
 
 Cornhill to Grand Cairo/ sufficiently attest his activity during the years 
 which preceded the great epoch of 'Vanity Fair/ These books are full 
 of sense, and wit, and humour, and it seems extraordinary that their 
 author should have been within a year or two of forty before he was 
 really famous. Their very truthfulness, however, — the easy quiet of their 
 best philosophy, — the slyness of their choicest irony, — the gentlemanly 
 taste of their heartiest abandon^ — all this was caviare to the vulgar, in- 
 cluding the vulgar of the critical press. The offer of * Vanity Fair ' was 
 decHned by one pubHsher ; and good judges said that a necessary im- 
 pulse was given to its appreciation, by an article during its progress in 
 the Edinburgh Review. It was still the fashion, as far as it was fash- 
 ionable to speak of Thackeray at all, to treat him as a satirist. An 
 admirable satirist he had, indeed, just proved himself in the ' Snob 
 Papers'— a series that stands high above anything ever given to the 
 world in Punchy excepting Hood's ' Song of the Shirt.' Nor was 
 Thackeray ever ashamed of the title of satirist, knowing by what great 
 men it had been borne before him, and how much honest work there was 
 in the world for satire to do. But that he was a satirist only, he had 
 proved long before the ' Snob Papers ' to be absurd. Anybody who can 
 read, for instance, the story of Sam Titmarsh's sufferings and the loss of 
 his child, after the Diddlesex catastrophe, in the ' Hoggarty Diamond,' 
 without seeing that the writer's tenderness and power of representing 
 tenderness were exquisitely deep and exquisitely real, may conclude him- 
 self disqualified by nature for having an opinion on literary matters. 
 There are a few whose judgment on such things is much worth, — but his 
 is certainly worth nothing. 
 
 " When Thackeray wrote ' Vanity Fair,' in 1 846, '7, '8, he was living in 
 Young Street, Kensington, — a street on your left hand, before you come 
 to the church ; and here, in 1848, the author of this sketch had first the 
 pleasure of seeing him, of being received at his table, and of knowing 
 how essentially a kind, humane, and perfectly honest man he was. ' Vanity 
 Fair ' was then unfinished, but its success was made, and he spoke frankly 
 and genially of his work and his career. ' Vanity Fair' always, we thinkj 
 ranked in his own mind as best in story of his greater books ; and he 
 once pointed out to us the very house in Russell Square where his 
 imaginary Sedleys lived— a curious proof of the reality his creations had 
 for his mind. The man and the books were equally real and true ; and it 
 was natural that he should speak without hesitation of his books, if you 
 wished it ; though as a man of the world and a polished gentleman who 
 knew the world thoroughly, literature to him only took its turn among 
 other topics. From this point of view his relation to it was a good deal 
 like that of S.cott, According to Lockhart, people were wrong in saying 
 that Sir Walter declined at all markedly to talk about literature, and yet 
 his main interest was in active life. J. 1st so, Thackeray was not bookish, 
 and yet turned readily to the subject of books, if invited. His reading 
 was undoubtedly large in Memoirs, Modern History, Biography, Poetry, 
 Essays, and Fiction, — and, taken in conjunction with his scholarship, 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 379 
 
 probably placed him as a man of letters above any other novelist except 
 Sir Bulwer Lytton. Here is a characteristic fragment from one of his 
 letters, written in August 1854, and now before us : — ' I hate Juvenal,' he 
 says ; * I mean I think him a truculent brute, and I love Horace better 
 than you do, and rate Churchill much lower ; and as for Swift, you haven't 
 made me alter my opinion. I admire, or rather admit, his power as 
 much as you do ; but I don't admire that kind of power so much as I did 
 fifteen y^ars ago, or twenty shall we say. Love is a higher intellectual 
 exercise than hatred ; and when you get one or two more of those young ones 
 you write so pleasantly about, you'll come over to the side of the kind wags, 
 I think, rather than the cruel ones.' Passages like this, which men who 
 knew him will not need to have quoted to them, have a double value for the 
 world at large They not only show a familiar command of writers whom it 
 is by no means easy to know well, — but they show what the real philo- 
 sophy was of a man whom the envious represented to the ignorant as a 
 cynic and a scoffer. Why, his favourite authors were just those whose 
 influence he thought had been beneficial to the cause of virtue and charity. 
 * I take off my hat to Joseph Addison,' he would say, after an energetic 
 testimony to his good effect on English life. He was in fact even greater 
 as a moralist than as a mere describeroi manners ; and his very hatred of 
 quackery and meanness was proved to be real by his simplicity, humanity 
 and kindliness of character. In private this great satirist, whose aspect 
 in a crowd was one of austere politeness and reserve, unbent into a fami- 
 liar ndivetl which somehow one seldom finds in the demonstratively 
 genial. And this was the more charming and precious that it rested on 
 a basis of severe and profound reflection, before the glance of which all 
 that was dark and serious in man's life and prospects lay open. The 
 gravity of that white head, with its noble brow and thoughtful face full of 
 feeling and meaning, enhanced the piquancy of his playfulness, and of the 
 little personal revelations which came with such a grace from the depths 
 of his kindly nature. When we congratulated him, many years ago, on 
 the touch in ' Vanity Fair' in which Becky ' admires ' her husband when 
 he is giving Lord Steyne the chastisement which ruins her for life, * Well, 
 he said, * when I wrote the sentence I slapped my fist on the table and 
 said, " that is a touch of genius ! " ' The incident is a trifle, but it 
 will reveal, we suspect, an element of fervour, as well as a hearti- 
 ness of frankness in recording the fervour, both equally at variance 
 with the vulgar conception of him. This frankness and bonhomie 
 made him delightful in a Ute-d,-Ute, and gave a pleasant human 
 flavour to talk full of sense, and wisdom, and experience, and lighted 
 up by the gaiety of the true London man of the world. Though 
 he said witty things now and then, he was not a wit in the sense 
 in which Jerrold was, and he complained sometimes that his best things 
 occurred to him after the occasion had gone by ! He shone most, — as in 
 his books, — in little subtle remarks on life, and little descriptive sketches 
 suggested by the talk. We remember in particular one evening, after a 
 dinner party at his house, a fancy picture he drew of Shakspeare during 
 
38o A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 
 
 his last years at Stratford, sitting out in the summer afternoon watching 
 the people, which all who heard it, brief as it was, thought equal to the 
 best things in his lectures. But it was not for this sort of talent, — rarely- 
 exerted by him, — that people admired his conversation. They admired 
 above all, the broad sagacity, sharp insight, large and tolerant liberality, 
 which marked him as one who was a sage as well as a story-teller, and 
 whose stories were valuable because he was a sage. Another point of 
 likeness to him in Scott was that he never overvalued story-telling, or 
 forgot that there were nobler things in literature than the purest creations 
 of which the object was amusement. * I would give half my fame,^ wrote 
 Scott, *if by so doing I could place 'the other half on a solid basis of 
 science and learning.' * Now is the time,' wrote Thackeray to a young 
 friend in 1849, * to lay in stock. I wish I had had five years' reading 
 before I took to our trade,' How heartily we have heard him praise Sir 
 Bulwer Lytton for the good example he set by being 'thoroughly literate!^ 
 We are not going to trench here on any such ground as Thackeray's 
 judgments about his contemporaries. But we may notice an excellent 
 point bearing on these. If he heard a young fellow expressing great 
 admiration for one of them, he encouraged him in it. When somebody 
 was mentioned as worshipping an eminent man just dead, — ' I am glad, 
 said Thackeray, * that he worships any body.' 
 
 "After 'Vanity Fair' Thackeray's fame steadily increased. 'Pendennis' 
 appeared during 1849 and 1850, and though it was generally considered 
 inferior in mere plot to its predecessor, no inferiority was perceived in the 
 essential qualities of character, thought, humour, and style. The an- 
 nouncement in the summer of 185 1 that he was about to lecture on the 
 English Humourists gave a thrill of pleasure to intellectual London ; and 
 when he rose in Willis' Rooms* to commence the course with Swift, all 
 that was most brilliant in the Capital was assembled to hear him. 
 Amidst a throng of nobles, and beauties, and men of fashion, were 
 Carlyle, and Macaulay, — Hallam with his venerable head, — and Charlotte 
 Bronte, whose own fame was just at its height, and who saw in the 
 lecturer her ideal of an elevated and high-minded master of literary art. 
 The lectures were thoroughly appreciated. Everybody was delighted to 
 see the great masters of English of a past age brought to life again in 
 their habits as they lived, and endowed with the warm human reality of 
 the lecturer's Dobbins, and Warringtons, and Pendennises. It was this 
 power, and not the literary criticism, which constituted the value of 
 Thackeray's lectures, and will secure their place in the biographical 
 literature of the country. 
 
 "Towards the close of 1852, 'Esmond 'appeared, and Thackeray sailedfor 
 America. * Esmond' constituted anew epoch in his career. By this time 
 
 • "He recalled the present writer from a tour in Scotland, in October, and 
 placed the MS. of the * Humourists' in his hands to edit and annotate during his 
 absence. The recent statement of an Edinburgh writer that it was * here ' he 
 lectured, is of course a blunder." 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 381 
 
 his celebrity, and the impression made by his distinct and peculiar 
 genius, — so different from that of the common sentimental schools,— had 
 provoked a certain amount of reaction. Cads who disliked him as a 
 gentleman, — Mechanics' Institute men who disliked him as a scholar, — 
 Radicals who knew that he associated with the aristocracy,— and the 
 numerous weaklings to whom his severe truth and perfect honesty of art 
 seemed horrible after the riotous animal spirits, jolly caricature, and 
 lachrymose softness of the style which he was putting out of fashion, — 
 this crew, we say, was by no means satisfied with the undoubted fact that 
 Thackeray was becoming the favourite writer of the cultivated classes. 
 They accordingly began to call his honesty cynicism, and his accuracy 
 reporting. They forgot that tears are pure in proportion to the depth 
 from which they come, and not to the quantity in which they flow, and 
 that the tenderness of a writer is to be estimated by the quality of his 
 pathos. They also forgot that as what they called hardness was mere 
 fidelity to truth, so what they called stenographic detail was mere finish 
 of art. The richer imaginativeness of 'Esmond,' and the freer play of 
 feeling in which the author allowed himself to indulge when dealing with 
 a past age, came in good time to rebuke cavillers, and prove that 
 Thackeray's mind was rich as well as wide. 'Esmond,' we take it, is the 
 favourite novel of his choicest admirers. He takes certain liberties with 
 history in it. For instance, the Duke of Hamilton, whom he represents, 
 as about to marry Beatrix when he is cut off in a duel, is, left a widower 
 spoken of by Swift in the 'Journal to Stella.' But as Scott makes 
 Leicester quote the ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' in ' Kenilworth', when 
 Shakspeare was about twelve or thirteen years of age, this may be 
 excused. 
 
 " It is a pity that Thackeray did not write expressly on America, for we 
 think that he would have written the most impartial English book to 
 which that country has yet given rise, When he returned from this first' 
 visit, he was a good deal away from town. ' Since my return from 
 America,' he writes in August, 1854, ' I have hardly been in London at 
 all, and when here, in such a skurry of business and pleasure as never to 
 call a day my own scarcely.' The passage is significant. Few lives were 
 more engrossed than his, discharging, as he did, at once the duties of a 
 man of letters and a man of fashion. He dined out a great deal during 
 the season. He went to the theatres. He belonged to three clubs— the 
 Athenaeum, Reform, and Garrick — to say nothing of minor associations, 
 for the promotion of good fellowship. With less of this wear and tear 
 we should have had more work from him — should have had, perhaps, the 
 History which long dwelt in his imagination as one of the creations of 
 the future. As it is, he achieved a great deal during the last eight or ten 
 years of his life. Two such elaborate novels as the 'Newcomes' and 'Vir- 
 ginians,' a second trip to America, and a ramble over Great Britain, with 
 a new set of lectures on the 'Four Georges' — not to mention a contested 
 election, and what he did for the ' Cornhill,' established on the strength of 
 his name, and for a time directly conducted by him— these were great 
 
582 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 doings for a man who, though naturally robust, was plagued and me-: 
 naced by more than one vexatious disorder of long continuance. And 
 he did them greatly — going into the world gaily and busily to the last, 
 and always finding time for such holy little offices of personal kindness 
 and charity as gave him, we believe and know, more real pleasure than all 
 his large share of the world's applause. He was much gratified by the 
 success of the 'Four Georges' (a series which superseded an earlier scheme 
 for as many discourses on ' Men of the World in Scotland.' ' I have had 
 three per cent, of the whole population here,' he wrote from Edinburgh, 
 in November, 1856. 'If I could but get three per cent, of London.' 
 He thoroughly appreciated the attention and hospitality which he met 
 with during these lecturing tours. And if, as would sometimes happen, 
 a local notability's adoration became obtrusive, or such a person thrust 
 his obsequious veneration upon him beyond the limits of the becoming, 
 his forbearance was all the more respectable on account of his sensitive- 
 ness. 
 
 " Latterly he had built himself a handsome house in Kensington, to which 
 he removed from Onslow Square, Brompton — his residence after leaving 
 Young Street in which he wrote Vmtity Fair. It was a dwelling worthy 
 of one who really represented literature in the great world, and who, 
 planting himself on his books, yet sustained the character of his pro- 
 fession with all the dignity of a gentleman. A friend who called on him 
 there from Edinburgh, in the summer of 1862, knowing of old his love 
 of the Venuszan, playfully reminded him what Horace says of those who, 
 regardless of their sepulchre, employ themselves in building houses : — 
 
 " Sepulcri 
 Immemor, struis domes." 
 
 ' Nay,' said he, ' I am meinor sepulcri^ for this house will always let 
 for so many hundreds (mentioning the sum) a-year.' How distant, then 
 seemed the event which has just happened, and with which the mind 
 obstinately refuses to familiarize itself, though it stares at one from a 
 thousand broadsheets ! Well, indeed, might his passing-bell make itself 
 heard through all the myriad joy -bells of the English Christmas ! It is 
 long since England has lost such a son — it will be long before she has 
 such another to lose. He was indeed emphatically English, — English as 
 distinct from Scotch, — no less than English as distinct from Continental, 
 — a different type of great man from Scott, and a different type of great 
 man from Balzac. The highest purely English novelist since Fielding, 
 he combined Addison's love of virtue with Johnson's hatred of cant, — 
 Horace Walpole's lynx-like eye for the mean and the ridiculous, with the 
 gentleness and wide charity for mankind as a whole, of Goldsmith. Nori 
 omnis mortuus est. He will be remembered in his due succession with 
 these men for ages to come, as long as the hymn of praise rises in the 
 old Abbey of Westminster,* and wherever the English tongue is native to 
 
 * **Dum Capitolium 
 Scandet cumtacita virgine Pontifex.'" 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 383 
 
 men, from the banks of the Ganges to those of the Mississippi.* This 
 humble tribute to his ilkistrious and beloved memory comes from one 
 whom he loaded with benefits, and to whom it will always throw some- 
 thing of sadness over the great city where he first knew him, that it con- 
 tains his too early grave." 
 
 Let us now turn to Anthony Trollope, who has accorded to Thackeray 
 " The design of a white marble statue in words." 
 
 Trollope dwells not so much on the great man's fame, as on his 
 loveable nature : — 
 
 " The fine grey head, the dear face with its gentle smile, the sweet 
 manly voice which we knew so well, with its few words of kindest greeting ; 
 the gait, and manner, and personal presence ot him whom it so delighted 
 us to encounter in our casual comings and goings about the town — it is 
 of these things, and of these things lost for ever, that we are now thinking ! 
 We think of them as of treasures which are not only lost, but which can 
 never be replaced. He who knew Thackeray will have a vacancy in his 
 heart's inmost casket, which must remain vacant till he dies. One loved 
 him almost as one loves a woman, tenderly and with thoughtfulness, — 
 thinking of him when away from him as a source of joy which cannot be 
 analysed, but is full of comfort. One who loved him, loved him thus, 
 because his heart was tender, as is the heart of a woman. * * * * 
 
 " It is not for any of us who were connected with him in the enterprise 
 to say whether this was done successfully or not ; but it is for us — for us 
 of all men — to declare that he was the kindest of guides, the gentlest of 
 rulers, and, as a fellow-workman, liberal, unselfish, considerate, beyond 
 compare. It has been said of him that he was jealous as a writer. We 
 of the Cornhill knew nothing of such jealousy. At the end of two years 
 Mr. Thackeray gave up the management of the Magazine, finding that 
 there was much in the very nature of the task which embarrassed and 
 annoyed him. He could not bear to tell an ambitious aspirant that his 
 aspirations were in vain : and, worse again, he could not endure to do so 
 when a lady was his suppliant. Their letters to him were thorns that 
 festered in his side, as he has told us himself In truth it was so. There 
 are many who delight in wielding the editorial ferule, good men and true 
 no doubt, who open their hearts genially to genius when they find it ; but 
 they can repress and crush the incapable tyro, or the would-be poetess 
 who has nothing to support her but her own ambition, if not with delight, 
 at least with satisfaction. Of such men are good editors made. Whether 
 it be a point against a man, or for him, to be without such power, they 
 who think of the subject may judge for themselves. Thackeray had it 
 not. He lacked hardness for the place, and therefore, at the end of two 
 years, he relinquished it. 
 
 " But he did not on that account in any way sever himself from the 
 Magazine. His ' Roundabout Papers,^ the first of which appeared in our 
 first number, were carried on through 1862, and were completed in the 
 
 * " Dicar qua violens obstrepit Aufidus," &c 
 
384 BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 early part of 1863. ' Lovel the Widower/ and his 'Lectures on 
 the Four Georges,' appeared under his own editorship. ' Philip ' was so 
 commenced, but was completed after he had ceased to reign. It was only 
 in November last, as our readers may remember, that a paper appeared 
 from his hand, entitled, ' Strange to say, on Club Paper.' In this he 
 ridiculed a silly report as to Lord Clyde, which had spread itself about 
 the town, — doing so with that mingled tenderness and sarcasm for which 
 he was noted, — the tenderness being ever for those named, and the 
 sarcasm for those unknown. As far as we know, they were the last 
 words he lived to publish. Speaking of the old hero who was just gone, 
 he bids us remember that * censure and praise are alike to him ; — " The 
 music warbling to the deafened ear, The incense wasted on the funeral 
 bier ! " How strange and how sad that these, his last words, should now 
 come home to us as so fitted for himself! Not that we believe that such 
 praise is wasted, — even on the spirit of him who has gone, — 
 
 * Comes the blind Fury with abhorred shears, 
 And slits the thin spun life ! *' But not the praise," 
 Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears.' 
 
 Why should the dead be inaccessible to the glory given to them by those 
 who follow them on the earth? He, of whom we speak, loved such in- 
 cense when living. If that be an infirmity he was so far infirm. But we 
 hold it to be no infirmity. Who is the man who loves it not ? Where is 
 the public character to whom it is not as the breath of his nostrils ? But 
 there are men to whom it is given to conceal their feelings. Of such 
 Thackeray was not one. He carried his heart-strings in a crystal case, 
 and when they were wrung or when they were soothed all their workings 
 were seen by friend and foe. 
 
 " When he died he was still at work for this Magazine. He was writing 
 yet another novel for the delight of its readers. * Shall we continue this 
 story-telling business and be voluble to the end of our age ? Will it not 
 be presently time, O prattler, to hold your tongue and let younger people 
 speak ? ' These words, of course, were his own. You will find them in 
 that Roundabout Paper of his, ' De Finibus,' which was printed in 
 August, 1862. He was voluble to the end; — alas! that it should have 
 been the end ! The leisure time of which he was thinking never came to 
 him. That presently was denied to him, nor had he lived would it have 
 been his for many a year to come. He was young in power, young in 
 heart as a child, young even in constitution in spite of that malady which 
 carried him off. But, though it was so, Thackeray ever spoke of himself, 
 and thought of himself, as of one that was old. He in truth believed 
 that the time for letting others speak was speedily coming to him. But 
 they who knew him did not believe it, and his forthcoming new novel was 
 anxiously looked for by many who expected another ' Esmond.' 
 
 " I may not say how great the loss will be to the Cornhill^ but I think 
 that those concerned in the matter will be adjudged to be right in giving 
 to the public so much of this work as he has left behind him. A portion 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 385 
 
 of a novel has not usually much attraction for general readers ; but we 
 venture to think that this portion will attract. They who have studied 
 Mr. Thackeray's characters in fiction,- and it cannot be doubted that 
 they have become matter of study to many, — will wish to follow him to 
 the last, and will trace with a sad but living interest the first rough lines 
 of the closing portraits from his hand. 
 
 " I shall not attempt here any memoir of Mr. Thackeray's life. Such 
 notices as the passing day requires have been given in many of the daily 
 and weekly papers, and have been given, I believe, correctly. I may, 
 perhaps, specially notice that from the pen of Mr. Hannay, which ap- 
 peared in the EdiJiburgh Courant. The writing of his life will be a task, 
 and we trust a work of love, for which there will probably be more than one 
 candidate. We trust that it may fall into fitting hands,— into the hands 
 of one who shall have loved wisely, and not too well, — but, above all 
 things, into the hands of a true critic. That which the world will most 
 want to know of Thackeray, is the effect which his writings have pro- 
 duced ; we believe that effect to have been very wide, and beneficial 
 withal. • Let us hope, also, that the task of his biography may escape that 
 untoward hurry which has ruined the interest of so many of the memoirs 
 of our latter-day worthies. 
 
 " Of our late Editor's works, the best known and most widely appre- 
 ciated are, no doubt, ' Vanity Fair,' ' Pendennis,' * The Newcomes,' and 
 
 * Esmond.' The first on the list has been the most widely popular with 
 the world at large. * Pendennis ' has been the best loved by those who 
 have felt and tasted the delicacy of Thackeray's tenderness. ' The New- 
 comes ' stands conspicuous for the character of the Colonel, who as an 
 English gentleman has no equal in English fiction. ' Esmond,' of all his 
 works, has most completely satisfied the critical tastes of those who 
 profess themselves to read critically. For myself, I own that I regard 
 
 * Esmond ' as the first and finest novel in the English language. Taken 
 as a whole, I think that it is without a peer. There is in it a completeness 
 of historical plot, and an absence of that taint of unnatural life which 
 blemishes, perhaps, all our other historical novels, which places it above 
 its brethren. And, beyond, this, it is replete with a tenderness which is 
 almost divine — a tenderness which no poetry has surpassed. Let those 
 who doubt this go back and study again the life of Lady Castlewood. In 
 ' Esmond,' above all his works, Thackeray achieves the great triumph of 
 touching the innermost core of his subject, without ever wounding the 
 taste. We catch all the aroma, but the palpable body of the thing never 
 stays with us till it palls on us. Who ever wrote of love with more delicacy 
 than Thackeray has written in * Esmond ?' May I quote one passage of 
 three or four lines ? Who is there who does not remember the meeting 
 between Lady Castlewood and Harry Esmond after Esmond's return. 
 
 * Do you know what day it is ?' she continued. * It is the 29th December; 
 it is your birthday ! But last year we did not drink it ; — no, no ! My 
 lord was cold, and my Harry was like to die ; and my brain was in a 
 fever ; and we had no wine. But now — now you are come again, bringing 
 
386 BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 your sheaves with you, my dear.' vShe burst into a wild flood of weeping 
 as she spoke ; she laughed and sobbed on the young man's heart, crying 
 out wildly, — ' bringing your sheaves with you, — your sheaves with you ! ' 
 
 " But if ' Esmond ' be, as a whole, our best English novel. Colonel 
 Newcome is the finest single character in English fiction. That it has 
 been surpassed by Cervantes, in 'Don Quixote,' we may, perhaps, allow, 
 though ' Don Quixote ' has the advantage of that hundred years which 
 is necessary to the perfect mellowing of any great work. When Colonel 
 Newcome shall have lived his hundred years, and the lesser works of 
 Thackeray and his compeers shall have died away, then, and not till then, 
 will the proper rank of this creation in literature be appreciated. 
 
 " We saw him laid low in his simple grave at the close of last year, and 
 we saw the brethren of his art, one after another, stand up on the stone 
 at the grave foot to take a last look upon the coffin which held him. I 
 was very sad. There were there the faces of rough men red with tears 
 who are not used to the melting mood. The grave was very simple, as 
 became the sadness of the moment. At such times it is better that the 
 very act of interment should be without pomp or sign of glory. But, as 
 weeks pass by us, they who love English literature will desire to see 
 some preparation for placing a memento of him in that shrine in which 
 we keep the monuments of our great men. It is to be regarded as a 
 thing of course, that there should be a bust of Thackeray in Westminster 
 Abbey." 
 
 The bust is in the Abbey, the work of his dear friend and neighbour 
 Marochetti ; and thousands from far and near have stepped from Dickens' 
 grave to look upon it, linking together thus the memory of the two great 
 and generous rivals in English fiction of our time. 
 
 But I have always felt that, while ample justice has been done to the 
 heart as well as to the head of the author of " Picwick," the parent of 
 Colonel Newcome and of " Esmond" has suffered injustice at the hands 
 of his countrymen. This is owing to the subtlety and quaintness of his 
 humour, and to a certain shame-facedness there is in most of his tender 
 passages : this is very noticeable in many passages of his " Irish 
 Sketch-Book." In the Ursuline Convent, he observes : " I should have 
 liked to kneel down too, but was ashamed ; our northern usages not 
 encouraging— among men at least — that sort of abandonment of dignity. 
 Do any of us dare to sing psalms at church ? and don't we look with 
 rather a sneer at a man who does ? " Herein is expressed a feeling which 
 seems to hold Thackeray back — in his later and greater works at any 
 rate — when he is upon a sentimental passage. He turns out of the sick 
 chamber with a joke. He laughs that he may be saved from the indignity 
 of crying. 
 
 In his earher time — in the record of his Irish Jaunt, for instance, 
 published in the spring of 1843 — he would be even violent in his expres- 
 sion of anger at a wrong, or vehement in his advocacy. At the close of 
 a description of the trial of Timothy Woods for the murder of Michael 
 Laifan, he bursts out on the subject of capital punishment : — 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 387 
 
 ' " I confess, for my part to that common cant and sickly sentimentality 
 which, thank God ! is felt by a great number of people now-a-days, and 
 which leads them to revolt against murder, whether performed by a 
 ruffian's knife or a hangman's rope ; whether accompanied by a curse 
 from the thief, as he blows his victim's brains out, or a prayer from my 
 lord on the bench in his wig and black cap. Nay, is all the cant and 
 sickly sentimentality on our side, and might not some such charge be 
 applied to the admirers of the good old fashion ? Long ere this is printed, 
 for instance, Byrne and Woods have been hanged; sent *to face their 
 God,' as the Chief Justice says, * with the weight of their victim's blood 
 upon them,' — a just observation ; and remember, that it is we who send 
 them. It is true that the judge hopes Heaven will have mercy upon 
 their souls, but are such recommendations of particular weight because 
 they come from the bench ? Psha ! If we go on killing people without 
 giving them time to repent, let us at least give up the cant of praying for 
 their souls' salvation. We find a man drowning in a well, shut the lid 
 upon him, and then heartily pray that he may get out. Sin has hold of 
 him, as the two ruffians of Laffan yonder, and we stand aloof, and hope 
 thai he may escape. Let us give up the ceremony of condolence, and be 
 honest like the witness, and say, * Let him save himself or not, it's no 
 business of ours.' " 
 
 Finding himself in the midst of a crowd of ragged fellows round the 
 County Court House at Cork, who had cheered men convicted of 
 having thrown vitriol in the faces of some mill-owners ; he breaks out on 
 his own subject — endeavouring still with all his might to hold the 
 balance fairly between the judges and the judged : — 
 
 " There stand the men ; they are only separated from us by a fcAv 
 paces ; they are as fond of their mothers and children as we are ; their 
 gratitude for small kindnesses shown to them is extraordinary ; they are 
 . Christians as we are ; but, interfere with their interests, and they will 
 murder you without pity. It is not revenge so much which these poor 
 fellows take, as a brutal justice of their own. Now, will it seem a paradox 
 to say in regard to them and their murderous system, that the way to 
 put an end to the latter is to kill them no more ? Let the priest be able 
 to go amongst them and say, the law holds a man's life so sacred, that 
 it will on no account take it away. No man, nor no body of men, has a 
 right to meddle with human life ; not the Commons of England any more 
 than the Commons of Tipperary. This may cost two or three lives, 
 probably, until the system may come to be known and understood ; 
 but which will be the greatest economy of blood in the end "i " 
 
 In the two Irish volumes there are a score of passages through which 
 the warmth of Thackeray's generous heart glows with a heat not found 
 in any of his later works. The heart had not grown colder ; but the 
 artist had ripened and become fastidious. I conclude with the ending 
 of his visit to the Ursuline Convent. It is a noble burst of righteous 
 indignation : — 
 
 " In the grille is a Httle wicket and a ledge before it. It is to this 
 
388 BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 wicket that the women are brought to kneel, and a bishop is in the 
 chapel on the other side, and takes their hands in his, and receives their 
 vows. I had never seen the like before, and own that I felt a sort of 
 shudder in looking at the place. There rest the girl's knees as she offers 
 herself up, and forswears the sacred affections which God gave her ; 
 there she kneels and denies for ever the beautiful duties of her being — no 
 tender maternal yearnings, no gentle attachments are to be had for her, 
 or from her — there she kneels and commits suicide upon her heart. O 
 honest Martin Luther ! thank God you came to pull that infernal, wicked, 
 unnatural altar down — that cursed Paganism ! Let people, solitary, worn 
 out by sorrow, or oppressed with extreme remorse, retire to such places ; 
 fly and beat your breasts in caverns and wildernesses, O women, if you 
 will, but be Magdalens first. It is shameful that any young girl, with 
 any vocation, however seemingly strong, should be allowed to bury her- 
 self in this small tomb of a few acres. Look at yonder nun — pretty, 
 smiling, graceful and young — what has God's world done to her that she 
 should mn from it, or she done to the world that she should avoid it .? 
 What call has she to give up all her duties and affections ; and would she 
 not be best serving God with a husband at her side and a child on her 
 knee ? 
 
 " The sights in the house having been seen, the nun led us through the 
 grounds and gardens. There was the hay in front, and a fine yellow 
 corn-field at the back of the house, and a large melancholy-looking 
 kitchen garden ; in all of which places the nuns, for certain hours in the 
 day, are allowed to take recreation. * The nuns here are allowed to 
 amuse themselves more than ours at New Hall,' said a little girl who is 
 educated at the English convent ; ' do you know that here the nuns may 
 make hay ? ' What a privilege is this .? We saw none of the black 
 sisterhood availing themselves of it however ; the hay was neatly piled 
 into cocks and ready for housing ; so the poor souls must wait until next 
 year before they can enjoy this blessed sport once more. 
 
 " Turning into a narrow gate, with the nun at our head, we found our- 
 selves in a little green, quiet enclosure — it was the burial-place of the 
 convent. The poor things know the places where they are to lie ; she 
 who was with us talked smilingly of being stretched there one day, and 
 pointed out the resting-place of a favourite old sister who had died three 
 months back, and had been buried in the very midst of the little ground. 
 And here they come to live and die. 
 
 " The gates are open, but they never go out. All their world lies in 
 a dozen acres of ground ; and they sacrifice their lives in early youth, 
 many of them passing from the grave upstairs in the house to the 
 one scarcely narrower in the churchyard here; and are seemingly not 
 unhappy. 
 
 " I came out of the place quite sick ; and looking before me — there, 
 thank God ! was the blue spire of Monkstown church soaring up into 
 the free sky— a river in front rolling away to the sea — liberty, sunshine, 
 and all sorts of glad life and motion, round about ; and I couldn't but 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 389 
 
 thank Heaven for it, and the Being whose service is freedom, and who 
 has given us affections that we may use them — not smother and kill 
 them ; and a noble world to live in, that we may admire it, and Him 
 who made it — not shrink from it, as though we dared not live there, but 
 must turn our backs upon it and its bountiful Provider. And, in conclu- 
 sion, if that most cold-blooded and precise of all personages, the repect- 
 able and respected English reader, may feel disposed to sneer at this 
 sentimental homily, or to fancy that it has been written for effect, let him 
 go and see a convent for himself. I declare I think, for my part, t hat we 
 have as much right to permit Sutteeism in India, as to allow women in 
 the United Kingdom to take these wicked vows, or Catholic bishops to 
 receive them ; and that government has as good a right to interpose in 
 such cases as the police has to prevent a man from hanging himself, or 
 the doctor to refuse a glass of prussic acid to anyone who may have a 
 wish to go out of the world." The heartiness of this indignation is a 
 quality that was wanting in Thackeray's later writings. It is everywhere 
 in the account of his travels through the woe-begone districts of Ireland ; 
 and so is the thorough Liberalism of his sympathies. 
 
 " The National Education scheme," he observed — " a noble and liberal 
 one, at least as far as a stranger can see, which might have united the 
 Irish people, and brought peace into this most distracted of all countries, 
 failed, unhappily, of one of its greatest ends. The Protestant clergy have 
 always treated the plan with bitter hostility ; and I do believe, in with- 
 drawing from it, have struck the greatest blow to themselves as a body, 
 and to their own influence in the country, which has been dealt to them 
 for many a year. Rich, charitable, pious, well-educated, to be found in 
 every parish in Ireland, had they chosen to fraternize with the people 
 and the plan, they might have directed the educational movement ; they 
 might have attained the influence which is now given over entirely to the 
 priest ; and when the present generation, educated in the national 
 schools, were grown up to manhood, they might have had an interest in 
 almost every man in Ireland. Are they not as pious, and more polished, 
 and better educated, than their neighbours, the priests.? There is no 
 doubt of it ; and by constant communion with the people they would 
 have gained all the benefits of the comparison, and advanced the interests 
 of their religion far more than now they can hope to do. Look at the 
 national school : throughout the country it is commonly by the chapel 
 side — it is a Catholic school, directed and fostered by the priest ; and as 
 no people are more eager for learning, more apt to receive it, or more 
 grateful for kindness, than the Irish, he gets all the gratitude of the 
 scholars who flock to the school, and all the future influence over them, 
 which naturally and justly comes to him. The Protestant wants to better 
 the condition of these people ; he says that the woes of the country are 
 owing to its prevalent religion ; and in order to carry his plans of 
 amelioration into effect, he obstinately refuses to hold communion with 
 those whom he is desirous to convert to what he believes are sounder 
 principles and purer doctrines. The clergyman will reply, that points of 
 
390 THE BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 principle prevented him. With this fatal doctrinal objection it is not, or 
 course, the province of a layman to meddle ; but this is clear, that the 
 parson might have had an influence over the country and he would not ; 
 that he might have rendered the Catholic population friendly to him and 
 he would not ; but instead, has added one cause of estrangement and 
 hostility more to the many which already existed against him. This is 
 one of the attempts at union in Ireland, and one cannot but think with 
 the deepest regret and sorrow of its failure." 
 
 Read by the light of the last few years, these words, written some 
 thirty years ago are very impressive. 
 
 Thackeray's liberal spirit shines most vividly among the productions 
 of his riper years— in his " Roundabout Papers." Of these, his paper 
 "On Ribbons " is fullest of this quality. He observes, "In England, 
 until very late days, we have been accustomed rather to pooh-pooh 
 national Orders, t.o vote ribbons and crosses, tinsel gewgaws, foolish 
 foreign ornaments, and so forth. It is known how the Great Duke (the 
 breast of his own coat was plastered with some half-hundred decorations) 
 was averse to the wearing of ribbons, medals, clasps, and the like, by 
 his army. We have all of us read how uncommonly distinguished Lord 
 Castlereagh looked at Vienna, where he was the only gentleman present 
 without any decoration whatever. And the Great Duke's theory was, 
 that clasps and ribbons, stars and garters, were good and proper orna- 
 ments for himself, for the chief officers of his distinguished army, and for 
 gentlemen of high birth, who might naturally claim to wear a band of 
 crarter blue across their waiscoats ; but that for common people your 
 plain coat, without stars and ribbons, was the most sensible wear." 
 
 Then how admirably the subject is wound up ! 
 
 " In the winter of '53, I went from Marseilles to Civita Vecchia, in one 
 of the magnificent P. and O. ships, the Valetta, the master of which sub- 
 sequently did distinguished service in the Crimea. This was his first 
 Mediterranean voyage, and he sailed his ship by the charts alone, going 
 into each port as surely as any pilot. I remember walking the deck at 
 night with this most skilful, gallant, well-bred, and well-educated gentle- 
 man, and the glow of eager enthusiasm with which he assented, when I 
 asked him whether he did not think a ribbon or order would be wel- 
 come or useful in his service. 
 
 " Why is there not an Order of Britannia for British seaman ? In 
 the Merchant and Royal Navy alike, occur almost daily instances 
 and occasions for the display of science, skill, bravery, fortitude in trying 
 circumstances, resource in danger. In the first number of our Magazine, 
 a friend contributed a most touching story of the M'Clintock expedition, 
 in the dangers and dreadful glories of which he shared ; and the writer 
 was a merchant captain. How many are there (and, for the honour of 
 England, may there be many like him !)— gallant, accomplished, high- 
 spirited, enterprising masters of their noble profession } Can our 
 Fountain of Honour not be brought to such men 1 It plays upon captains 
 and colonels in seemly profusion. It pours forth not illiberal rewards 
 
A DAY WITH W. M. THACKERAY. 391 
 
 upon doctors and judges. It sprinkles mayors and aldermen. It bedews 
 a painter now and again. It has spirted a baronetcy upon two, and 
 bestowed a coronet upon one noble man of letters. Diplomatists take 
 their Bath in it as of right ; and it flings out a profusion of glittering stars 
 upon the nobility of the three kingdoms. Cannot Britannia find a ribbon 
 for her sailors? The Navy, royal or mercantile, is a Service. The 
 command of a ship, or the conduct of her, implies danger, honour, 
 science, skill, subordination, good faith. It may be a victory, such as 
 that of the Sarah Sajidsj it may be discovery, such as that of the Fex ; 
 it may be heroic disaster, such as that of the Birkenhead; and in such 
 events merchant seamen, as well as royal seamen, taketheir share. 
 
 " Why is there not, then, an Order of Britannia ? One day a young 
 officer of the Euryahis may win it ; and having just read the memoirs 
 of Lord Dundonald, I know who ought to have the first Grand Cross." 
 
 A writer in Once a JVeek ]a.te\y remarked on Thackeray's power of 
 imitating the styles of his contemporaries : — 
 
 " It is curious that the best specimen of Disraeli's style that can be 
 given in a few lines is not Disraeli's at all, but Thackeray's. In his 
 * Novels by Eminent Hands,' he has ' CodHngsby : by the Right Hon. 
 B. Shrewsberry '— a wonderfully good imitation in caricature of Disraeli's 
 style. 
 
 " They entered a moderate-sized apartment— indeed, Holywell street 
 is not above a hundred yards long, and this chamber was not more than 
 half that length — and fitted up with the simple taste of its owner. 
 
 " The carpet was of white velvet — (laid over several webs of Aubusson, 
 Ispahan, and Axminster, so that your foot gave no more sound as it trod 
 upon the yielding plain than the shadow which followed you)— of white 
 velvet painted with flowers, arabesques, and classic figures by Sir William 
 Ross, J. M. W. Turner, R.A., Mrs. Mee, and Paul Delaroche. The 
 edges were wrought with seed pearl, Valenciennes lace and bullion. The 
 walls were hung with cloth of silver, embroidered with gold figures, over 
 which were worked pomegranates, polyanthuses, and passion-flowers, in 
 ruby, amethyst, and smaragd. The drops of dew which the artificershad 
 sprinkled on the flowers, were of diamonds. The hangings were over- 
 hung with pictures yet more costly. Giorgione the gorgeous, Titian the 
 golden, Rubens the ruddy and pulpy (the Pan of Painting), some of 
 Murine's beatified shepherdesses, who smile on you out of darkness like 
 a star ; a few score of first-class Leonardos, and fifty of the master- 
 pieces of the patron of Julius and Leo, the imperial genius of Ufbino, 
 covered the walls of the little chamber. Divans of carved avtbery 
 covered with ermine, went round the room, and in the midst was a 
 fountain pattering and bubbling into jets of double-distilled otto of roses. 
 
 " * Pipes, Goliath ! ' Rafael said gaily, to a little negro with a silver 
 collar (he spoke to him in his native tongue of Dongola); 'and welcome 
 to our snuggery, my Codlingsby.'" 
 
 ******* 
 
 " Her hair had that deep glowing tinge in it which has been the delight 
 
39^ BEST OF ALL GOOD COMPANY. 
 
 of all painters, and which, therefore, the vulgar sneer at, It was of 
 burning auburn, meandering over her fairest shoulders in twenty thou- 
 sand minute ringlets ; it hung to her waist, and below it. A light-blue 
 velvet fillet, clasped with a diamond aigrette (valued at two hundred 
 thousand tomauns, and bought from Lieutenant Vicovich, who had re- 
 ceived it from Dost Mahomed), with a simple bird of Paradise forming 
 her head-gear. A sea green cymar, with short sleeves, displayed her ex- 
 quisitely-moulded arms to perfection, and was fastened by a girdle of 
 emeralds over a yellow satin frock. Pink gauze trousers, spangled with 
 silver, and slippers of the same colour as the band which clasped her 
 ringlets (but so covered with pearls, that the original hue of the charming 
 papoosh disappeared entirely), completed her costume. She had three 
 necklaces on, each of which would have dowered a princess ; her fingers 
 glittered with rings to their rosy tips ; and priceless bracelets, bangles, 
 and armlets wound round an arm that was whiter than the ivory grand 
 piano on which it leaned." 
 
 PuncJi^s forty-sixth volume, January, 1864, opens with — 
 "William Makepeace Thackeray. 
 
 " While generous tributes are everywhere paid to the'genius of him who 
 has been suddenly called away in the fulness of his power and the 
 maturity of his fame, some who have for many years enjoyed the advan- 
 tage of his assistance and the delight of his society would simply record 
 that they have lost a dear friend. At an early period in the history of this 
 Periodical he became a contributor to its pages, and he long continued 
 to enrich them, and though of late he had ceased to give other aid than 
 suggestions and advice, he was a constant member of our council, and 
 sat with us on the eighth day from that which has saddened England's 
 Christmas. Let the brilliancy of his trained intellect, the terrible strength 
 of his satire, the subtlety of his wit, the richness of his humour, and the 
 catholic range of his calm wisdom, be themes for others, the mourning 
 friends who inscribe these lines to his memory think of the affectionate 
 nature, the cheerful companionship, the large heart and open hand, the 
 simple courteousness, and the endearing frankness of a brave, true, 
 honest gentleman, whom no pen but his own could depict as those who 
 knew him most desire." 
 
 With these just words on a just gentleman, my Day with him shall 
 close. 
 
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