WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

"POOR Thackeray, adieu, adieu!" wrote Carlyle when he heard of the novelist's death; "he had many fine qualities, no guile or malice against any mortal, a big mass of a soul, but not strong in proportion; a beautiful vein of genius lay struggling about him." Mr. Leslie Stephen adds that Thackeray's weakness was "the excess of sensibility of a strongly artistic temperament." When this excess of sensibility was thrown back upon itself by the rebuffs of the world, it found expression not, as with Carlyle, in rage and denunciations, but in a humor which moved between the extremes of laughter and tears, and in that form of fiction which exposes the follies and hypocrisy of mankind rather than its great vices and great virtues.

William Makepeace Thackeray was born July 18, 1811, at Calcutta. His great-grandfather was archdeacon of Surrey, while his grandfather, his father, and several of his uncles had been distinguished in the civil service of the East India Company. The father died when Thackeray was five years old, and the latter was sent back to England in 1817, living there with an aunt. His mother was married soon after in India to a Major Smyth, coming, however, to England with her husband in 1821. At the age of eleven Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse School, and remained there till he was seventeen. His experiences are described with fair accuracy in the story of Pendennis, where the school is called Greyfriars, and the place itself is fondly

pictured in the latter chapters of The Newcomes. Mr. Merivale prints the recollections of a school-comrade, who remembered breaking Thackeray's nose in a fight, and admiring the "little poems and parodies" which the victim wrote in the latter years of his course. The broken nose remained as a deformity throughout the novelist's life, and spoiled an otherwise handsome face. Joined with his great height (he was well over six feet), his bulk, and the enormous size of his head, this defect lent itself easily to caricature, but he was not very sensitive about it, and loved to tell how he proposed to a traveling showman who had just lost the giant of the show, that he should take the giant's place. "You're nigh tall enough," was the answer, "but I'm afraid you're too hugly." One of his friends at Charterhouse was John Leech, afterwards his fellow worker on Punch. After a short residence with his parents in Devonshire, where he contributed some verses to a local newspaper, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829. One side of his life here, the dining and wining and expensive side, may be followed between the lines of Pendennis's career at Oxbridge, though the weak and conceited Pen himself is no portrait of the author. As a matter of fact, he made friends among the best men of his day, such as Thompson, afterwards Master of Trinity, who was a member of a little essay club which Thackeray himself formed, Edward FitzGerald, Kinglake, Milnes, Spedding, and Tennyson. The first of these friends says that though "careless of university distinction," Thackeray "had a vivid appreciation of English poetry, and chanted the praises of the old English novelists, especially his model, Fielding. He had always a flow of humor and pleasantry and was made

much of by his friends." With regard to actual literary effort we hear only of a parody upon Tennyson's prize poem of Timbuctoo. He left Cambridge in 1830, taking no degree. He now traveled on the Continent and made some stay at Weimar, where he met the poet Goethe and picked up enough of the language to serve him for his delightful translations and for his still more delightful but harmless satire on the provincial life of that day, especially the pomposities of the little German courts. No one has succeeded better than Thackeray in portraying the continental watering-places with their eternal rouge-et-noir, the cosmopolitan crowd of adventurers and gamblers, the petty German aristocracy, and the haughty English tourists, papa stolid and contemptuous, mamma vigilant and censorious, the daughters all innocence and ignorance, and the sons making voyages of discovery in roulette. Next year he was settled in chambers in the Temple reading law, the same quarters where his Pendennis and Warrington wrote "copy" and led their delightful Bohemian life.

The fact of Thackeray's transition from the study of law to the practice of letters is certain; but the reasons for the change are somewhat obscure. Of course he had a strong impulse towards the vocation of author, and in Germany had sketched out plans for serious literary work. When we find him actually writing, however, it is to earn his bread. He had a fortune from his father, variously stated at from ten to twenty thousand pounds. Some of this he sank in unsuccessful journalism. Two newspapers in which he invested money along with his stepfather came rapidly to grief. Funds, moreover, had been injudiciously invested, and he lost heavily by the failure of an Indian bank, a tragedy which is reflected