The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-04 00:00:00

HIS LAST ILLNESS.

As there are many stories in circulation respecting the
circumstances which immediately preceeded Mr. Thackeray's
death, the following facts, which were obligingly given us
by one of his most intimate personal friends, may not prove
uninteresting. It appears that although generally enjoying
good health, he was at intervals subject to severe spasms of
the stomach, which caused violent retching and nausea, and
lest him in a state of utter prostration often for hours after
the first violence of the attack had passed away. On the
night of his death, his mother, who slept overhead, heard
him get up and walk about his room, but was not alarmed,
as this was a habit with her son when he felt any symptoms
of an attack coming on. In the morning his valet came into
Mr. Thackeray's bedroom as usual, and saw him lying on
his back quite still, with his arms spread over the coverlet, bu
he took nonotice, as he also was accustomed to see his mas-
ter thus after one of his stomach attacks. He brought some
coffee and set it down beside the bed, and it was only when
he returned after an interval and found that the cup had not
been tasted, that a sudden alarm seized him, and he disco-
vered that his master was dead. Mr. Thackeray had in
fact been seized when his mother heard him get up in the
night and walk about the room, and the violence of the
attack, it is supposed, brought on the effusion on the brain,
which, as the post-mortem examination showed, was the
immediate cause of death. Mr. Joseph Durham. the emi-
nent sculptor, has undertaken to preserve the likeness of his
deceased friend in a marble bust, which he means to pre-
sent to the Garrick Club.—Daily News.
THE PUBLICATION OF " VANITY FAIR,"

At last, set Thaciteray in his place among the first
novelists of Europe. and among the men of letters
most sought after by opulent and titled personages
at home and abroad. It is instructive to observe
how the class of persons whom writers like Thackery love
to analyze and to satirize—fools of quality—rich, idle folk
who want to be amused—free-living men and women,
whose morals would the least bear exposure, have alway
been the most eager to welcome, to cherish, and to admit
into the fold of intimacy the very guests and observers,
" those authors," whom they have the most reason to dread .
—A!henceum.

"AND THERE CAME UP A LION OUT OF JUDAH,''
were Miss Brontës first words after standing for some time
before Lawrence's likeness of Tb.ackeray. She meant that
the face expressed first to her mind a deep " rage " at the
treachery of human nature, in which a generous nobility
and also a destructive fever of almost animal spite were
blended in equal proportions. And she spoke with a true
literary instinct. The peculiar power of Thackeray's genius
lies in the strange effervescence of these widely different
elements,—a profound tenderness of feeling, a pathos of
more than feminine delicacy and more than masculine com-
prehensiveness, with a power of cynical fury which is always
impelling him to spring upon the selfishness and duplicities
of human nature and tear them to pieces before our eyes in
that animal transport of retributive passion which the lion
symbolises to the imagination.
HIS MELANCHOLY

Was not peculiar to him ; it is more or less a
characteristic of the age, It 'savours the talk even of
the young men and women of the present day; it is visible
in the ascetic spirit of pre-Raphaelite art ; it per meetes our
prose literature, and even makes itself felt in the utterances
of the newspaper press ; it rings with a sweet sad music in
the verse of Tennyson and of the Brownings. Old social
forms and transmitted ideas have broken up before the ad-
vance of knowledge, and reconstruction has not in all
things kept pace with demolition. The times are not only
" out of joint," but morbidly observant of the fact. This
may be only the sickening for a higher life ; but the effect
is sometimes that of a conscious death. Poverty, ignorance,
sin, and crime weigh on our minds and hearts more heavily
than they used to de—not because they are greater in degree
them formerly, but because we are made more incessantly
aware of them by the restless activity of the press. We
burn with a rapid and eager flame as life burns in consump-
tion ; and a mournful sense of evanescence and incomplete-
ness—of change, and loss, and want, and unsatisfied aspire:-
tion—lies for ever at the core of our perceptions of all things-
Thus it comes to pass that the leading authors of the day
are almost all shadowed with this brooding melancholy.
Dickens is perhaps the only conspicuous exception among
living men; in him, a hearty physical nature, and a spirit
of jovial enjoyment, have acted as antidotes to the sadder
tendencies of the age. Thackeray tasted to the full all that
is sorrowful in our times, and gave it out again, like a
quintessence, in his books. Yet we must not confound
the gloom of the present generation with that of the one
preceding it—the eadnet s of Thackeray and the sadness of
Byron. The two are distinct species of the same genus.
The earlier form was saturnine, despairful, passionate, and
protesting—now angrily struggling with fate, now sar-
donically mocking it. The later development is resigned,
tranquil, half-amused in the midst of its teals, inclined to
make the best of things as far as it can, but thinking th
best, after all, a rather poor affair. He whom we
have lost so recently, and whom we yet mourn, will
live in the thoughts of our posterity chiefly as a
novelist; yet he had great claims also as an essayist and a
critic. The qualities and habits of his mind directed him
more to the writers of the time of Anne and the early Georges
than to any others in our mighty range of authorship ; and
he found in them the models of the purely literary part of
his writings. He seems to have been less attracted by the
lurid lights and shades, the gloom and glory, and withal the
somewhat extravagant and feverish painting, of the men con-
temporary with Shakespeare;
and to have turned with a
kindred spirit to the even grace, the polished irony. the
fine worldly sense, the burning sarcasm, and the consum-
mate execution of Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, and Sterne.
In feeling, he was a product of this age ; in style, he was a
product of that; and the union of the two, together with
his own piercing insight into the ways and thoughts of
men, made him a truly original genius. He has left his
stamp upon the century. How far the impression will be
permanent, and how for his influence
this is not the time to estimate. At present, we stand by
his new-made grave, and can only mourn and praise.—
London Review. has been healthy,

ABERDEEN GRAMMAR SCHOOL AND LORD BYRON.
Among other traditions, one of the most fascinating
is that of Lord Byron's connection with the grammar school
at Aberdeen. When, in 1792, Byron's mother had sepa-
rated from her husband, the profligate Captain Byron, of
the Guards, she, being by birth a Miss Gordon of Gicht in
Aberdeenshire, had retired to Aberdeen with her little lame
London-born boy, then not quite five years old, and with
about £l3O a year saved from her fortune which her hus-
band had squandered. The little fellow, living with his
mother in the Breadgate, and catching up the Aberdeen
dialect, which he never quite fcrgot, learnt his first lessons
from two or three private tutors in succession, the last of
whom he mentions as " a very serious, saturnine, but kind
young man, named Patterson," the son of his shoemaker,
but a good scholar. "With hin," he says, "I began Latin
in Ruddiman's Grammar, and continued till I went to the
Grammar School (Scotia* Schule),' Aberdonice ' Squeel'),

where I threaded all the classes to the fourth, when I was
recalled to England,
where I had been hatched, by the de-
mise of my uncle." The fact thus lightly mentioned by
Byron was, as may be supposed, no small splendour in the
annals of Aberdeen. There were many alive in the town
who remembered the lame boy well, and some who had been
his schoolfellows. We rued to fancy the "faction" in
which he had oftenest sat; and there was no small search
for his name or initials, reported to be still visible, cut by
his own hand, on one of the " facticns"—always, I believe,
without success. One school-legend about him greatly im-
pressed us. It was said that, on his coming to school the
first morning after his accession to the peerage was known,
and on the calling out of his name in the catalogue no longer
as " Georgi Gordon Byron," but as " Georgi, Baro de
Byron," he did not reply with the usual and expected
" Adsum," but, feeling the gaza of all his schoolfellows,
burst into tears and ran out. But there are half a hun-
dred Aberdeen myths about Byron, and this may be one of
thew.—From Ilfamntllan's Magazine for January.

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