pictured in the latter chapters of The Newcomes. Mr. Merivale prints the recollections of a school-comrade, who remembered breaking Thackeray's nose in a fight, and admiring the "little poems and parodies" which the victim wrote in the latter years of his course. The broken nose remained as a deformity throughout the novelist's life, and spoiled an otherwise handsome face. Joined with his great height (he was well over six feet), his bulk, and the enormous size of his head, this defect lent itself easily to caricature, but he was not very sensitive about it, and loved to tell how he proposed to a traveling showman who had just lost the giant of the show, that he should take the giant's place. "You're nigh tall enough," was the answer, "but I'm afraid you're too hugly." One of his friends at Charterhouse was John Leech, afterwards his fellow worker on Punch. After a short residence with his parents in Devonshire, where he contributed some verses to a local newspaper, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829. One side of his life here, the dining and wining and expensive side, may be followed between the lines of Pendennis's career at Oxbridge, though the weak and conceited Pen himself is no portrait of the author. As a matter of fact, he made friends among the best men of his day, such as Thompson, afterwards Master of Trinity, who was a member of a little essay club which Thackeray himself formed, Edward FitzGerald, Kinglake, Milnes, Spedding, and Tennyson. The first of these friends says that though "careless of university distinction," Thackeray "had a vivid appreciation of English poetry, and chanted the praises of the old English novelists, especially his model, Fielding. He had always a flow of humor and pleasantry and was made

much of by his friends." With regard to actual literary effort we hear only of a parody upon Tennyson's prize poem of Timbuctoo. He left Cambridge in 1830, taking no degree. He now traveled on the Continent and made some stay at Weimar, where he met the poet Goethe and picked up enough of the language to serve him for his delightful translations and for his still more delightful but harmless satire on the provincial life of that day, especially the pomposities of the little German courts. No one has succeeded better than Thackeray in portraying the continental watering-places with their eternal rouge-et-noir, the cosmopolitan crowd of adventurers and gamblers, the petty German aristocracy, and the haughty English tourists, papa stolid and contemptuous, mamma vigilant and censorious, the daughters all innocence and ignorance, and the sons making voyages of discovery in roulette. Next year he was settled in chambers in the Temple reading law, the same quarters where his Pendennis and Warrington wrote "copy" and led their delightful Bohemian life.

The fact of Thackeray's transition from the study of law to the practice of letters is certain; but the reasons for the change are somewhat obscure. Of course he had a strong impulse towards the vocation of author, and in Germany had sketched out plans for serious literary work. When we find him actually writing, however, it is to earn his bread. He had a fortune from his father, variously stated at from ten to twenty thousand pounds. Some of this he sank in unsuccessful journalism. Two newspapers in which he invested money along with his stepfather came rapidly to grief. Funds, moreover, had been injudiciously invested, and he lost heavily by the failure of an Indian bank, a tragedy which is reflected

to some degree in the ruin of Colonel Newcome's great project. Worst of all, he had undoubtedly lost large sums at play. Walking, in his later days, with Sir Theodore Martin through the playrooms at Spa, and stopping at the rouge-et-noir table, Thackeray pointed out a seedy broken-down man among the gamblers, and said, "That was the original of my Deuceace; I have not seen him since the day he drove me down in his cabriolet to my brokers in the City, where I sold out my patrimony and handed it over to him." The patrimony in this instance seems to have been only £1500; but there may have been other cases of the kind. Like his own Clive Newcome, he thought to earn his living by art, and studied hard in Paris. This was in 1834, but in 1835 he was already known as a journalist, acting as the Paris correspondent of a new Liberal newspaper, The Constitutional; and journalist he was to remain for years in spite of occasional attempts in the other profession, as when, upon the death of Seymour, he called on Dickens with two or three drawings in his hand and asked permission to go on with the illustrations of Pickwick. The contrast implied by this interview has been duly noted by Thackeray's biographers. Dickens was about to spring into the full tide of a popularity which never failed him, while the young man whom he dismissed was to struggle on for a dozen years before the public acknowledged his greatness.

With eight guineas a week for his work as correspondent, and with no other fortune, Thackeray now married, August 20, 1836, a lady of Irish extraction, Isabella, daughter of Colonel Shawe. For six months he drew his pay, and then his newspaper failed. For a while he earned ten francs a day in Paris by writing