In Memoriam--W.M. Thackeray

It has been desired by some of the personal friends of the great
English writer who established this magazine, {1} 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 himself, and always with the warmest generosity.

I saw him first nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to
become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last, shortly
before Christmas, at the Athenaeum Club, when he told me that he had
been in bed three days--that, after these attacks, he was troubled
with cold shiverings, "which quite took the power of work out of
him"--and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy which he
laughingly described. He was very cheerful, and looked very bright.
In the night of that day week, he died.

The long interval between those 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, announcing
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
greatness and the goodness of the heart that then disclosed itself.

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 pathetically, 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