postponed till to-morrow.' Although he received large sums for his
writings, he managed without much difficulty to keep his expenditures
fully abreast, and often in advance of, his receipts. His pecuniary
object in visiting America the second time was to lay up, as he said, a
"pot of money" for his two daughters, and he left the country with more
than half his lecture engagements unfulfilled. He was to have visited
various cities in the Middle and Western States; but he took up a
newspaper one night, in his hotel in New York, before retiring, saw a
steamer advertised to sail the next morning for England, was seized with
a sudden fit of homesickness, rang the bell for his servant, who packed
up his luggage that night, and the next day he sailed. The first
intimation I had of his departure was a card which he sent by the pilot
of the steamer, with these words upon it: "Good by, Fields; good by,
Mrs. Fields; God bless everybody, says W.M.T." Of course he did not
avail himself of the opportunity afforded him for receiving a very large
sum in America, and he afterwards told me in London, that if Mr. Astor
had offered him half his fortune if he would allow that particular
steamer to sail without him, he should have declined the
well-intentioned but 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