II. THACKERAY.

Dear old Thackeray!--as everybody who knew him intimately calls him, now
he is gone. That is his face, looking out upon us, next to Pope's. What
a contrast in bodily appearance those two English men of genius present!
Thackeray's great burly figure, broad-chested, and ample as the day,
seems to overshadow and quite blot out of existence the author of "The
Essay on Man." But what friends they would have been had they lived as
contemporaries under Queen Anne or Queen Victoria! One can imagine the
author of "Pendennis" gently lifting poor little Alexander out of his
"chariot" into the club, and revelling in talk with him all night long.
Pope's high-bred and gentlemanly manner, combined with his extraordinary
sensibility and dread of ridicule, would have modified Thackeray's usual
gigantic fun and sometimes boisterous sarcasm into a rich and strange
adaptability to his little guest. We can imagine them talking together
now, with even a nobler wisdom and ampler charity than were ever
vouchsafed to them when they were busy amid the turmoils of their
crowded literary lives.

As a reader and lover of all that Thackeray has written and published,
as well as a personal friend, I will relate briefly something of his
literary habits as I can recall them. It is now nearly twenty years
since I first saw him and came to know him familiarly in London. I was
very much in earnest to have him come to America, and read his series
of lectures on "The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century," and
when I talked the matter over with some of his friends at the little
Garrick Club, they all said he could never be induced to leave London
long enough for such an expedition. Next morning, after this talk at the
Garrick, the elderly damsel of all work announced to me, as I was taking