The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-07 00:00:00

THE LATE MR, THACKERAY,

ARTESIAN WELL AT DONCASTER.—The boring
having penetrated into a fissure, water in great volume has
been obtained. The present yiell is estimated by Mr.
Dale, the engineer, 9,t four taillion gallong a day.

A very interesting sketch of Mr. Thackeray, from
the pen of Mr. James Hannay, the well known
writer, has appeared in the Edinburgh Courant. The
following are a few extracts
By birth Mr. Thackeray belonged to the upper middle
class—a section of our curiously divided society which con-
tains many cadets of old families, and forms a link between
the aristocracy and the general bulk of the liberal profes-
sions. He used sometimes to say that " it takes three gene-
rations to make a gentleman," and though this was not a
rpssitt which he would have applied strictly in the case of
another man, he was far from insensible to the advantage in
himself. He was descended from an old Saxon stock long
settled inYorkshire. His great-grandfather was Dr. Thacke-
ray, of Harrow, who went to Cambridge in 1710, an ex3el-
- scholar and clever man, who partly educated Sir Wm.
Jones, and when epitaph was written by his pupil Dr. Parr.
The son of the doctor married a Miss Webb, of the old Eng-
lish family to which the Brigadier Webb, of Marlborough's
wars, belonged—whose portrait is drawn with something of
the geniality of kinsmanvhip in "Esmond." This Thacke-
ray, we believe, was the first of the race to settle in India,
where his son also sought his fortunes, and where his grand-
son the novelist was born, at Calcutta, in 1811. There are
numerous descendants of the scholarly old headmaster of
Harrow scattered over the English Church and in the
Indian service, and traces of the influence of family con-
nections are found all through the books of the man who
has made his name famous.

Like other English children born in India, young
Thackeray was sent home early, and the voyage—during
which he had an eager and wondering peep at the great
Napoleon
in his island prison—was among his earliest re-
collections. He received his education at Charterhouse--
the well-known Greyfriars of his stories—an ancient and
famous public school. From Charterhouse he went to
Cambridge, which he left without taking a degree; and he
entered on life with health, strength, a noble figure, an
excellent genius, and £20,000, the last of which blessings
was the first (owing, it is said, to unfortunate speculations)
to leave him. But this loss was not complete till he had
hal the full benefit of a good culture and a good experience.
He travelled over Europe, and resided in its capitals,
while his mind was young and fresh ; and laid in those
stores of observation to which we owe sketches with
which everybody is familiar, He had an interview with
Goethe at Weimar, his description of which may be
seen in the " Life of Goethe" by Mr. Lewes ; and he
studied art at Rome. If he had had his choice, he
would rather have been famous as an artist than as a
writer ; but it was destined that he should paint in
colours which will never crack and never need restora-
tion. All his artist experience did him just as much good in
literature as it could have in any other way; and in travel-
ling through Europe to see pictures, he learned not them
only, but men, manners, and languages, He read German ;
he knew French well, and spoke it elegantly ; and in market
places, salons, hotels, museums, studios, the sketch-book of
his mind was always filling itself. Paris was one of his most
important headquarters in every way, and to his stay there
the world owes perhaps the best of his poems—the " Chro-
nicle of the Drum."
Thackeray 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—£.soo 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 Cole-
ridge--he had, we believe, no personal acquaintance. Sydney
Smith he met at a later time ; and remembered with satis-
faction that something which ho 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 intimate—and Carlyle, always one of his
most appreciating friends—survive. From reminis-
cences of the wilder lights in the Fraser constel-
lation were drawn the pictures of the queer fellows
connected with literature in " Pendennis," Cap-
tain Shandon, the ferocious Bludyer—stout old Tom
Sergeant—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
Fraser articles. "I suppose we will begin by being too
savage," is the phrase of a letter wh:ch he wrote in 1819 ;
"I know one who did." He was alluding here to the
"Yellow plush papers" in particular, where living men
were freely handled. This old, wild satiric spirit it was which
made him interrupt even the earlier chapters of " Vanity
Fair," by introducing a parody, which he could not resist,
of some contemporary novelists. In the last 15 years of his
life, he wrote under greater restraint, and with a sense of
his graver responsibilities as one of the leading men of letters
of the country. But his satire was never at any time malig-
nant; and the fine freedom of his early writing, developed
his genius, as the scenes of the arena developed the athlete,
He was writing tor 12 or 13 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. ThePartheeon--an ill-omened name,borne after
along interval by another journal quite recently defunct. lie
certainly contributed some things to the rates, during
Barnes's editorship—an article on Fielding amongst them;
though not, we should think, leading articles, a kind of
work for which he had no relish, and for which he believed
himself to have no turn. Fraser was the organ with which
he was most successfully connected till the days of his
Fund. engagement. It was, indeed, as a magazinist that
he educated himself for a novelist. The offer of " Vanity
Fair" was declined by one publisher ; and good judges said
that a necessary impulse was given to its appreciation by
an article during its progress in the Edinburgh Review.
'When Thackeray wrote " Vanity Fair," in 1819-7-8, he
was living in Young-street, Kensington ; 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 ea-
sentially a kind, humane, and p erfectly 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 think, ranked in his
own mind as best in story of his greater books ; end he once
pointed out to us the very house in Russell-square where his
imaginary Sedleya 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, litera-
ture 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 Scott. 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.
Just so, Thackeray was not bookish, and yet turned readily
to the subject of books, if invited. His reading was un-
doubtedly large in memoirs, modern history, biography,
poetry, essays, and fiction—and, taken in conjunction with
his scholarship, probably placed him, as a man of letters,
above any other novelist except Sir Buiwer 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 you a truculent brute, and 1 love
Horace better than you de, 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 as much as I did 15 years
ago, or 20 shall we say. Love is a higher intellectual exercise
than hatred ; and, when you gat 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 com-
mand of whom it is by no means easy to know well,—
but they show what the real philosophy was of a man whom
'the envious represented to the ignorant as a cic and a
scoffer. Why, his favourite authors were just those whose
influence he thought had been beneficial to the cause of
virtue and charity. " 1 take off my hat to Joseph Addison,"
he wogld say, after an energetic testimony to his good effect
on English life. Ho was, in fact, even greater as a moralist
than as a mere describer of manner; and his very hatred of
quackery and meanness was proved to be real by his.siplicity, humanity, and kindliness of character. In private,
this great satirist, whose aspect in a crowd was often one of
austere politeness and reserve, unbent into a familiar naivete
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
li o and prospects lay open. The gravity of that white
head, with its noble brow, and thoughtful face full of feel-
ing 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 ho is giving Lord Steyno 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
ie a touch of genius l' " The incident is a trifle, but it will
reveal, we suspect, an element of fervour, as well as a
heartiness of frankness in recarding, the fervour, both
equally at variance with the vulgar conception of him.
This frankness and bonhononie made him delightful in a
tete-a-tete, 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 hie best things occurred to him after the occasion was
gone by.
After " Vanity Fair," Thackeray's fame steadily in-
weasel. "Pendennis" appeared during 1849 and 1830, 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
announcement in the summer of 1851 that he v. as about to
lecture on the English Humourists gave a thrill of plea-
sure to intellectual L -,ndon ; and when he rose in Willis's
Rooms to commence the course with Swiit, all that was
most brilliant in the capital was assembled to hear him,