ut impossible favor, and gone on board.

No man has left behind him a tenderer regard for his genius and foibles
among his friends than Thackeray. He had a natural love of good which
nothing could wholly blur or destroy. He was a most generous critic of
the writings of his contemporaries, and no one has printed or spoken
warmer praise of Dickens, in one sense his great rival, than he.

Thackeray was not a voluminous correspondent, but what exquisite letters
he has left in the hands of many of his friends! "Should any letters
arrive," he says in a little missive from Philadelphia, "addressed to
the care of J.T.F. for the ridiculous author of this, that, and the
other, F. is requested to send them to Mercantile Library, Baltimore. My
ghostly enemy will be delighted (or will gnash his teeth with rage) to
hear that the lectures in the capital of Pa. have been very well
attended. No less than 750 people paid at the door on Friday night, and
though last night there was a storm of snow so furious that no
reasonable mortal could face it, 500 (at least) amiable maniacs were in
the lecture-room, and wept over the fate of the last king of these
colonies."

Almost every day, while he was lecturing in America, he would send off
little notes exquisitely written in point of penmanship, and sometimes
embellished with characteristic pen-drawings. Having attended an
extemporaneous supper festival at "Porter's," he was never tired of
"going again." Here is a scrap of paper holding these few words,
written in 1852.

"Nine o'clock, P.M. Tremont.

"Arrangements have just been concluded for a meeting _somewhere_
to-night, which we much desire you should attend. Are you equal to
two nights running of good time?"

Then follows a pen portrait of a friend of his with a cloven foot and a
devil's tail just visible under his cloak Sometimes, to puzzle his
correspondent, he would write in so small a hand that the note could not
be read without the aid of a magnifying-glass. Calligraphy was to him
one of the fine arts, and he once told Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, that
if all trades failed, he would earn sixpences by writing the Lord's
Prayer and the Creed (not the Athanasian) in the size of that coin. He
greatly delighted in rhyming and lisping notes and billets. Here is one
of them, dated from Baltimore without signature:--

"Dear F----th! The thanguinary fateth (I don't know what their anger
meanth) brought me your l