his hat and asked where he should drive us. It
was then between one and two o’clock,—time
certainly for all decent diners out to be at rest.
Thackeray put on one of his most quizzical expressions,
and said to John, in answer to his question, “I
think we will make a morning call on the Lord Bishop
of London.” John knew his master’s
quips and cranks too well to suppose he was in earnest,
so I gave him my address, and we went on. When
we reached my lodgings the clocks were striking two,
and the early morning air was raw and piercing.
Opposing all my entreaties for leave-taking in the
carriage, he insisted upon getting out on the sidewalk
and escorting me up to my door, saying, with a mock
heroic protest to the heavens above us, “That
it would be shameful for a full-blooded Britisher
to leave an unprotected Yankee friend exposed to ruffians,
who prowl about the streets with an eye to plunder.”
Then giving me a gigantic embrace, he sang a verse
of which he knew me to be very fond; and so vanished
out of my sight the great-hearted author of “Pendennis”
and “Vanity Fair.” But I think of
him still as moving, in his own stately way, up and
down the crowded thoroughfares of London, dropping
in at the Garrick, or sitting at the window of the
Athenaeum Club, and watching the stupendous tide of
life that is ever moving past in that wonderful city.
Thackeray was a master in every sense, having
as it were, in himself, a double quantity of being.
Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated so strangely
in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son
of Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin
brother of the Stratford Seer. There was nothing
in him amorphous and unconsidered. Whatever he
chose to do was always perfectly done. There was
a genuine Thackeray flavor in everything he was willing
to say or to write. He detected with unfailing
skill the good or the vile wherever it existed.
He had an unerring eye, a firm understanding, and
abounding truth. “Two of his great master
powers,” said the chairman at a dinner given
to him many years ago in Edinburgh, “are satire
and sympathy.” George Brimley remarked,
“That he could not have painted Vanity Fair as
he has, unless Eden had been shining in his inner
eye.” He had, indeed, an awful insight,
with a world of solemn tenderness and simplicity, in
his composition. Those who heard the same voice
that withered the memory of King George the Fourth
repeat “The spacious firmament on high”
have a recollection not easily to be blotted from
the mind, and I have a kind of pity for all who were
born so recently as not to have heard and understood
Thackeray’s Lectures. But they can read
him, and I beg of them to try and appreciate the tenderer
phase of his genius, as well as the sarcastic one.
He teaches many lessons to young men, and here is one
of them, which I quote memoriter from “Barry
Lyndon”: “Do you not, as a boy, remember
waking of bright summer mornings and finding your mother
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