The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-28 00:00:00

MR. THACKERAYS DEATH.

SPECTATOR:The great event of the week to
England is the loss of her great satirist Mr.
Thackeray, who died early on Dec. 24, in the 52d
year of his age, of effusion on the brain, brought
on, it is supposed, by violent sickness, to which he
was periodically subject. Of a new novel promised
by him to the Cornhill Magazine he had completed
four numbers, and only two or three days before his
death was showing his achievement to a friend in
the most buoyant spirits. His death at the season
which has so often been associated with his higher
literary efforts strikes us with something of the
same imaginative effect as those Christmas books
themselves, in which the thin veil of superficial
•gaiety was constantly blowing aside, and showing
the graduated depths of darkness beneath. He is
the founder of a school of satire of which he will
rrobably be the only master, though he has already
had many imi!ators. We do not wonder that he
failed as a painter, for painting, which must select
an effect visible in a single moment of time, gave
no scope to the peculiar mobility of his genius.
Ho delighted in varying indefinitely the expression
visible on the face of his characters, so that before
the contraction of the suffering nerve, or the sneer
of the parted lips was distinctly visible, it was gone,
and if you sought to recover the source of the im•
pression it was seldom easy to do so. There was a
strange mixture of pain and pathos i❑ all his pic-
tures; bitterness and tenderness mingled their tones
in the laugh of the humorist, and there was some-
thing at once loving and fatalistic about the frequent
gleams of his religious feeling. Tennyson has ex-
pressed the essence of his genius, though not of its
highest temper, in the line—

Out of that mood was born
Self-scorn—and then laughter at that self •scorn.

SATURDAY REVIEW.—The death of Mr. Macke-
ray, in the height of his popularity, is a calamity
which will not indeed affect any public interest, but
which yet will be widely felt. This generation is
not strong in humourists ; but to those few whom
we do possess belongs the credit of having given
refinement and delicacy to an art in which those
qualities were n.)t formerly conspicuous. Mr.
Thackeray was one of the best examples of a school
of which the popularity has been enormous, and
which has done no slender service in raising the
character and establishing the purity of English
literature.

EXAMINER.—Mr. Thackeray was found dead in
his bed on Thursday morning. Sudden as the loss of
Peel, or of Talfourd, or of Lord Macaulay, whose
death saddened the Christmas holidays three years
ago—sudden also as other recent deaths of able men
who laboured worthily in the world's eye, but whose
calling did not bring them so near as that of a fore-
most novelist to the world's heart, has been this
new cause of public grief. For a few days past
Mr. Thackeray had been slightly unwell; yet he
was about among his friends, and he was out even
on Wednesday evening. But when called at about 9
o'clock on Thursday morning he was found dead in
his bed, with placid face, having apparently died
without suffering pain. Mr. Thackeray's age
was but 52, and he seemed a man large, vigorous,
cheerful, with yet a quarter of a century of life in
him. There were some parts of his character that
never felt the touch of his years, and these were ten-
derly remembered yesterday at many a Christmas
fireside. There was to the last in him the sensibi
lity of a child's generous heart that time had not
sheathed against light touches of pleasure and pain.
His sympathy was prompt and keen, but the same
quick feeling made him also over sensitive to the
small annoyances that men usually learn to take for
granted as but one form of the friction that belongs
to movements of all kinds. He was sensitive to his
sensitiveness, and did in his writings what thou-
sands of men do in their lives, shrouded an over
tender heart in a transparent vale of cynicism. Often
he seemed to his readers to be trifling or nervously
obtruding himself into his story when he was but
shrinking from the full discovery of his own simple
intensity of feeling.
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Naval and Military Intelligence.