days of his life-on Founder's day-as An interesting letter of Mr. Thackeray his custom was, he dined there, highly to Mr. G. H. Lewes, which the latter has gratified, and vociferously cheered by the inserted in his work on "Goethe," gives Carthusians of this present generation. a vivid view of his life at the little Saxon He would there get as good a classical capital. "The Grand Duke and Duchess education as any public school could im- received us with the kindest hospitality. part; and Mr. Hannay tells us that, The court was splendid, and yet most though he let most of his Greek slip pleasant and homely. We were invited away, he was to the last an excellent in our turns to dinners, balls, and assemLatinist. He appears to have been very blies there. On the winter nights we sensible of the advantages of a regular used to charter sedan-chairs, in which education, and to have regretted that he we were carried through the snow to had not better availed himself of his own. those pleasant court entertainments. I, "Now is the time," he wrote to a young for my part, had the good luck to purfriend, in 1849, "to lay in stock. I wish chase Schiller's sword, which still hangs I had had five years' reading before I in my study. We knew the whole society took to our trade." From thence he of the little city, and but that the young proceeded to the University of Cam- ladies, one and all, spoke admirable Engbridge, where he remained, we believe, lish, we surely might have learned the seven or eight terms. "He entered on very best German. The society met life," says Mr. Hannay, "with health, constantly. The ladies of the court had strength, a noble figure, an excellent their carriages. After three-and-twenty genius, and twenty thousand pounds; years' absence I passed a couple of sumthe last of which blessings (owing, it is mer days in the well-remembered place, said, to unfortunate speculations) was the and was fortunate enough to find some first to leave him." A French editor, of the friends of my youth. . . In however, (M. Vapereau,) states that his 1831, though he had retired from the father (it should have been his step-father) world, Goethe would nevertheless very embarked in a newspaper speculation, kindly receive strangers. His daughterbringing out a paper called the Consti-in-law's tea-table was always spread for tution, in which his son made his début us. We passed hour after hour there, in literature; and, the speculation being and night after night, with the pleasanta failure, the disappointed and harassed est music and talk. My delight in those projector left his country and resided at days was to make caricatures for children. Boulogne. While Thackeray's means I was touched to find that they were rewere in existence he turned them to ex-membered, and some were kept until the cellent and to generous account. He present time; and very proud to be told, gave poor Maginn, an author as unfortu- as a lad, that the great Goethe had looked nate as he was brilliant, five hundred at some of them. Any of us who had pounds. He travelled over Europe, and books or magazines from England sent resided in various of its capital cities. them to him, and he examined them eagerTo Rome he went for the purpose of ly. With a five-and-twenty years' experistudying art. A friend has in his pos- ence since those happy days of which I session a most ingenious letter which write, and an acquaintance with an imThackeray wrote him from Rome, writ- mense variety of human-kind, I think I ten in the old French of Ronsard and have never seen a society more simple, Marot, which exhibits a greater mastery charitable, courteous, gentlemanlike, than over the French language than most that of the dear little Saxon city where Frenchmen possess. He resided for a the good Schiller and the great Goethe time at Weimar, which might then be lived and lie buried." called the literary capital of Germany. It seems that his primary object was to study pictures everywhere; and in doing so he obtained much of his wonderful acquaintance with the men and manners of many countries. Some albums at Weimar still show with pride the early caricatures which he contributed to them. Subsequently to the Weimar visit Thackeray resided for a considerable time at Paris. He liked Paris, and often returned to it, and frequently made it his headquarters. A writer in the Edinburgh Review, in 1848, in a remarkable article which first drew public attention to the great genius of Vanity Fair, then 66 appearing in numbers, says: "We well remember, ten or twelve years ago, finding him, day after day, engaged in copying pictures in the Louvre, in order to qualify himself for his intended profession." Literature now growingly vied with art, and eventually eclipsed it. He became a correspondent both for English and American papers. He lived, we are informed, over the water," in the Quartier Latin. The Paris correspondent of the Morning Post gives the following interesting anecdote: "One morning, on entering Mr. Thackeray's bedroom in Paris, I found him placing some napoleons in a pill-box, on the lid of which was written One to be taken occasionally.' 'What are you doing?' said I. Well,' he replied, there is an old person here who says she is ill and in distress, and I strongly suspect that this is the sort of medicine she wants. Dr. Thackeray intends to leave it with her himself. Let us walk out together."" He became a busy contributor to Fraser's Magazine, and also to reviews and newspapers, including the Times. With a sly allusion to his artistic taste he assumed the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, which in course of time obtained a kind of vague celebrity. In those days the young satirist pushed the limits of satire to their very fullest extent; and it is remarkable how, while so freely criticising others, he was himself always keenly susceptible to criticism. "I suppose we all begin by being too savage," he says in a letter to a friend: "I know one who did," meaning himself. "As for Swift," he once wrote to his friend Mr. Hannay, "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 as much as I did fifteen years 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 ways, I think, rather than the cruel ones." Many of these writings are now irrevocably lost they served their object, and perhaps had no claim to a prominent reputation. The Paris Sketch-Book he dedicated to his Paris tailor, who lent him a thousand francs when he stood in need of it. "A kindness like yours, 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 name. Let us add, sir, that you live on the first floor, that your clothes and fit are excellent, and your charges moderate and just." In the Irish Sketch-Book, a work which is gracefully dedicated to his friend Charles Lever, "from whom I have received a hundred acts of kindness and cordial hospitality," there are various passages graver than are Thackeray's wont. Amid much humor and pathos, much clear narrative and amusing exaggeration, there are abundant indications of a shrewd, observant, and thoughtful man. Let us take, for instance, some passages of much interest in his account of the Ursuline Convent at Cork: """Tis the prettiest nun of the whole house,' whispered the lady who had been educated at the convent; and I must own that, slim, gentle, and pretty as this young lady was, and calculated with her kind smiling face and little figure to frighten no one in the world, a great six-foot Protestant could not help looking at her with a little tremble. Here I was in a room with a real live nun, pretty and pale. I wonder has she any of her sisterhood immured in oubliettes down below? Is her poor little weak delicate body scarred all over with scourgings, iron collars, hair shirts? What has she had for dinner to-day? As we passed the refectory there was a faint sort of vapid nun-like vegetable smell, speaking of fasts and wooden platters; and I could picture to myself silent sisters eating their meal. "In the grille is a little wicket and a ledge before it. It is to this wicket that 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 at looking at the place. There rest the girl's knees as she offers herself up, and fors wears 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 or from her: there she kneels and commits suicide upon her heart. Oh! honest Martin Luther! thank God, you came to "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, all sorts of glad life and motion round about; and I couldn't but thank Heaven for it, and the Being whose ser vice 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." eighteen shirts and lay in a sea-stock of "And when, its force expended, Came blushing o'er the sea, I thought, as day was breaking, There was probably no time which Mr. Thackeray enjoyed more than the Mediterranean trip which he took in the autumn of 1844, and of which he has given an account in his work, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo. The Peninsular and Oriental Company arranged an excursion of two months, in which the excursionists should see all the principal cities on the shores of the Mediterranean. One day at his club the idea was A prayer at home for me." suddenly suggested to him by a friend, Apropos to this, he gives a pleasant that he should join in this excursion. He account of getting home letters at Cairo. was assured that the directors of the "I saw a young Oxford man seize his company would make him the present of dispatches, and slink off with several a berth. This settled the matter. "To letters written in a light neat hand, and break his outstanding engagements; to sedulously crossed, which any man could write letters to his amazed family, stating see, without looking farther, were the that they were not to expect him at din-handiwork of Mary Ann, to whom he is ner on Saturday fortnight, as he would attached. The lawyer received a bundle be at Jerusalem on that day; to purchase from his chambers, in which his clerk eased his mind regarding the state of | might have witnessed. We were shown Snooks v. Rodgers, Smith abs. Tomkins, over the magnificent barbaric church; etc. The statesman had a packet of visited, of course, the grotto where the thick envelopes, decorated with that blessed Nativity is said to have taken profusion of sealing-wax in which official place, and the rest of the idols set up for recklessness lavishes the resources of the worship by the clumsy legend. When country; and your humble servant got the visit was concluded the party going just one little, modest letter, containing to the Dead Sea filed off with their another written in pencil characters, armed attendants; each individual travvarying in size between one and two eller making as brave a show as he could, inches; but how much pleasanter to read and personally accoutred with warlike than my lord's dispatch or the clerk's swords and pistols. The picturesque account of Smith abs. Tomkins; yes, crowds, and the Arabs and the horsemen even than the Mary Ann correspondence. in the sunshine; the noble old convent Yes, my dear madam, you will under- and the gray-bearded priests with their stand me when I say that it was from feast; and the church and its pictures little Pólly at home, with some confiden- and columns and incense; the wide tial news about a cat, and the last report brown hills spreading round the village, of her new doll." with the accidents of the road, flocks and shepherds, wells and funerals, and camel trains, have left on my mind a brilliant, romantic, and cheerful picture. But you, dear M, without visiting the place, have imagined one far finer; and Bethlehem, where the Holy Child was born, and the angels sang Glory to God in the highest, and peace and good-will on earth,' is the most sacred and beautiful spot in the earth to you." Some notices of his rapid visit to the Holy Land are written with great earnestness and feeling. The following testimony is valuable: "We brought with us one of the gentlemen of the mission, a Hebrew convert, the Rev. Mr. E; and lest I should be supposed to speak with disrespect of any of the converts of the Hebrew faith, let me mention this gentleman as the only one whom I had the fortune to meet on terms of intimacy. I never saw a man whose outward conduct was more touching, whose sincerity was more evident, and whose religious feeling seemed more deep, real, and reasonable." "We went to Bethlehem, too, and saw the apocryphal wonders there. Five miles' ride brings you from Jerusalem to it, over naked, barren hills; the aspect of which, however, grows more cheerful as you approach the famous village. Hard by was Rebecca's well: a dead body was lying there, and crowds of male and female mourners dancing and howling round it. Now and then a little troop of savage, scowling horsemen a shepherd driving his black sheep, his gun over his shoulder; a troop of camels, or of women with long blue robes and white veils, bearing pitchers, and staring at the strangers with their great solemn eyes; or a company of laborers, with their donkeys, bearing grain or grapes to the city, met us and enlivened the little ride. We were entertained by the Superior of the Greek Convent in a fine refectory, with ceremonies and hospitalities that pilgrims of the middle ages ; Mr. Brown's Letters to his Nephew are admirably written; some of them vividly recall the Spectator and Tatler, and are the best things of the kind since the Tatler and Spectator were written. In these pages he publicly described the London club life with which he was so familiar. But throughout Thackeray's writings there is an undoubted autobiographic view; and, if our limits permitted the attempt, it might be possible to exhibit both his internal and external history for many years. His school days, how often are they alluded to, from some of the earliest of his miscellanies to the final Roundabout Papers. Pendennis is a tolerably fair transcript of his college days and subsequent times. The scenery of Clavering, St. Mary, and Chatteris is, in effect, Ottery, St. Mary, and Exeter, near which his step-father rented a place at which he used to stay. His experiences in France are all turned to admirable account in the Adventures of Philip. He has given some interesting personal narratives of his adventures in America; for instance, a Mississippi Bubble. The first work in which Thackeray had full scope to exhibit his extraordi nary powers was Vanity Fair. It was home. The lectures proved a mine of one which took the world by storm. wealth, being most successful in London Then, when he was getting on for forty, and the country, and he passed over to he became famous, and began to be America to deliver them there. "At wealthy. It can hardly be said that be- Washington Mr. Irving came to a lecfore this the public had treated a great ture given by the writer, which Mr. Fillauthor with neglect. Thackeray flow-more and General Pierce, the President ered late; his genius required to be mellowed by time. He had not arrived at full intellectual maturity before his first large work was issued. When his genius was fully exhibited it was fully recog nized. and President elect, were also kind enough to attend together." "Once in America a clever and candid woman said to me, at the close of a dinner, during which I had been sitting beside her, 'I was told I should not like you, and Mr. Thackeray also made some at- I don't! Well, ma'am,' said I, in a tempts in poetry and art. He was hard-tone of the most unfeigned simplicity, 'I ly, in any high sense of the word, a poet, don't care." " In 1856 Mr. Thackeray nor was poetry an object to which he in again made a profitable visit to America, any marked degree devoted himself, and delivered his lectures on the "Four nor to which he referred much of his Georges." thought, study, and observation. "But," as Mr. Hannay fairly says, "inside his fine, sagacious, common-sense under standing there was, so to speak, a pool of poetry, like the impluvium in the hall of a Roman house, which gave an air of coolness and freshness and nature to the solid marble columns and tesselated floor." What is true of his poetry is also, in a high degree, true of his art. To be a great artist was his never-realized ambition. To the last he was always busy with his crayons. He would probably have much preferred being a great artist to being a great author. He attempted to illustrate some of his own works, but his success was not such as to encourage him to continue the experiment. But in one direction his artistic studies were eminently successful: I mean his vignettes - those in which the initial letters of his chapters were so curiously intertwined. They frequently sum up the whole comedy of the chapter, and give evidence of admirable wit and originality. Let us here add that he followed the prevailing fashion of issuing Christmas books: Our Street, Rebecca and Rowena, Dr. Birch and his Young Friends, The Kickleburys on the Rhine. When the Times attacked the last of these in magniloquent language, he retaliated by an essay on Thunder and Small Beer. In 1851 the happy idea occurred to Mr. Thackeray of turning lecturer. The subject he selected was the "English Humorists;" and with its history and literature he was most thoroughly at I think that what he says of George III. is, for pathos and eloquence, perhaps the most masterly of what he has written. "The heart of England still beats kindly for George III.," he has written elsewhere, and we are glad that Thackeray could feel so for him and thus eloquently speak: "All the world knows the story of his malady: all history presents no sadder figure than that of the old man, blind and deprived of reason, wandering through the rooms of his palace, addressing imaginary parliaments, reviewing fancied troops, holding ghostly courts. I have seen his picture as it was taken at this time, hanging in the apart ment of his daughter, the Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, amidst books and Windsor furniture, and a hundred fond reminiscences of her English home. The poor old father is represented in a purple gown, his snowy beard falling over his breast, the star of his famous order still idly shining on it. He was not only sightless: he became utterly deaf. All light, all reason, all sound of human voices, all the pleasures of this world of God, were taken from him. Some slight lucid moments he had; in one of which the queen, desiring to see him, entered the room and found him singing a hymn and accompanying himself at the harpsichord. When he had finished he knelt down and prayed aloud for her, and then for his family, and then for the nation, concluding with a prayer for himself, that it might please God to avert his heavy calamity from him, but if not, to give him resignation to submit. He |