it; if
he had not seen a one-eyed giant, he had at least seen a two-eyed Hindu.

His early life followed the ordinary life of a thousand other boys born
of Anglo-Indian parents; that was, he went to school, where 'a girl
broke his heart and a boy broke his nose,' and he discovered that the
nose took longer to mend.

At Cambridge, Chesterton tells us, Thackeray found that it was a quite
easy thing to sit down and play cards and lose L1,500 in an evening, a
fact that very probably was more useful to him than twenty degrees.
Trinity College was the Thackeray College: it has had no more famous
son. It was said that Thackeray could order a dinner in every language
in Europe, which is to say he could have dined in comfort in any
restaurant in Soho.

From Cambridge, we learn, he made his way to the Bar, and at the same
time wrote articles in the hope that some editor might keep them from
the waste-paper basket. Chesterton tells us an interesting legend that
about this time Thackeray offered to illustrate the books of Dickens.
The offer was declined, which he thinks was 'a good thing for Dickens'
books and a good thing for Thackeray's.' Whether Thackeray ever really
did meet Dickens does not matter much; it is at least picturesque; 'it
affects the imagination as much as the meeting with Napoleon.'

There has always been what is for Chesterton a silly discussion--a
controversy as to whether Thackeray was a cynic. This was because he
happened to write first about villains, then about heroes; villains are
always more interesting than heroes, and not infrequently are much
better mannered. A cynic is a person who doesn't take the trouble to
find the motives for things, or he takes it for granted that the motives
are never disinterested ones. To say that Thackeray was a cynic because
he drew a large number of villains is as untrue as to say Swift was a
cynic because he wrote satire. Thackeray wrote about villains because he
wished to also write about heroes; Swift was satirical because he had
the intelligence to see that his contemporaries were fools when they
might have been wise. The cynics are the people of to-day who write
books which attribute low motives to every one, which turn love into
lust, which care not what is written so long as it can be made certain
that there is nothing in the world which has not a hidden meaning.

The first appearance of Thackeray in literature was in 'Fraser's
Magazine,' under the pseudo name