g,
he was too proud to have desired, may now be laid reverently upon his
grave.

There is a delicacy to be observed in describing one's intercourse with
a departed great man, since death does not wholly remove that privacy
which it is our duty to respect in life. Yet the veil which we
charitably drop upon weakness or dishonor may surely be lifted to
disclose the opposite qualities. I shall repeat no word of Thackeray's
which he would have wished unsaid or suppressed: I shall say no more
than he would himself have said of a contemporary to whom the world had
not done full justice. During a friendship of nearly seven years, he
permitted me to see that one true side of an author's nature which is
never so far revealed to the public that the malignant may avail
themselves of his candor to assail or the fools to annoy him. He is now
beyond the reach of malice, obtrusive sentiment, or vain curiosity; and
the "late remorse of love," which a better knowledge of the man may here
and there provoke, can atone for past wrong only by that considerate,
tender judgment of the living of which he was an example.

I made Thackeray's acquaintance in New York towards the close of the
year 1855. With the first grasp of his broad hand, and the first look of
his large, serious gray eyes, I received an impression of the essential
manliness of his nature,--of his honesty, his proud, almost defiant
candor, his ever-present, yet shrinking tenderness, and that sadness of
the moral sentiment which the world persisted in regarding as cynicism.
This impression deepened with my further acquaintance, and was never
modified. Although he belonged to the sensitive, irritable genus, his
only manifestations of impatience which I remember were when that which
he had written with a sigh was interpreted as a sneer. When so
misunderstood, he scorned to set himself right. "I have no brain above
the eyes," he was accustomed to say; "I describe what I see." He was
quick and unerring in detecting the weaknesses of his friends, and spoke
of them with a tone of disappointment sometimes bordering on
exasperation; but he was equally severe upon his own shortcomings. He
allowed no friend to think him better than his own deliberate estimate
made him. I have never known a man whose nature was so immovably based
on truth.

In a conversation upon the United States, shortly after we first met, he
said,--

"There is one thing in this country which astonishes me. You have