of battles, but it was enchanting. However, "Vanity Fair" was
under a taboo. It is not easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himself
informed a small boy, whom he found reading "Vanity Fair" under the
table, that he had better read something else. What harm can the story
do to a child? He reads about Waterloo, about fat Jos, about little
George and the pony, about little Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is happy
and unharmed.

Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very different and very
disagreeable world of a master's house, I was lucky enough to find a
charming library there. Most of Thackeray was on the shelves, and
Thackeray became the chief enchanter. As Henry Kingsley says, a boy
reads him and thinks he knows all about life. I do not think that the
mundane parts, about Lady Kew and her wiles, about Ethel and the Marquis
of Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one. Ethel was a mystery,
and not an interesting mystery, though one used to copy Doyle's pictures
of her, with the straight nose, the impossible eyes, the impossible
waist. It was not Ethel who captivated us; it was Clive's youth and art,
it was J. J., the painter, it was jolly F. B. and his address to the maid
about the lobster. "A finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never seen. Does
not this solve the vexed question whether lobsters are fish, in the
French sense?" Then "The Rose and the Ring" came out. It was worth
while to be twelve years old, when the Christmas books were written by
Dickens and Thackeray. I got hold of "The Rose and the Ring," I know,
and of the "Christmas Carol," when they were damp from the press. King
Valoroso, and Bulbo, and Angelica were even more delightful than Scrooge,
and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck. One remembers the fairy monarch more
vividly, and the wondrous array of egg-cups from which he sipped
brandy--or was it right Nantes?--still "going on sipping, I am sorry to
say," even after "Valoroso was himself again."

But, of all Thackeray's books, I suppose "Pendennis" was the favourite.
The delightful Marryat had entertained us with Peter Simple and O'Brien
(how good their flight through France is!) with Mesty and Mr. Midshipman
Easy, with Jacob Faithful (Mr. Thackeray's favourite), and with
Snarleyyow; but Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea. That did
not seem to be one's vocation. But the story of Pen made one wish to run
away to literature, to the Temple, to streets where Brown, the famous
reviewe