him more hopefully and trustfully than in the days when he walked through
Vanity Fair and saw how Mr. Timms, with not a penny in the bank, pinched
himself to give a little dinner in imitation of a great lord who gave a
great dinner, and had gold beyond his count; snobs, who wore paste jewels
and cotton-backed velvet, who cursed a fellow and strutted about in
imitation of noble lords, who wore real diamonds and silken velvets!
mimicking the follies of the great, but never their noble deeds and
heroisms.

He is beyond snobs now. He is in the land of heroisms and heroes. Yet he
feels he has been cheated by the fat parson who stole sovereigns from his
pocket to keep him out of h----! His spiritual bones fairly ache with the
leagues he has travelled, hunting up the throne of God! "Where the
deuce," he mutters, "is the showman?" He can't find the lake of fire and
brimstone without a guide.

Poor Thackeray! he again wipes his spectacles and feels he has been sold!
This life on the other side of Jordan he finds to be what his American
cousins would call a "humbug," a downright swindle upon the sympathies
and good taste of those who wear long streamers of crape, and groan and
sob over his funeral rites! He feels in duty bound (out of consideration
for those mourners who expect nothing else) to go scudding through the
air in a loose white shroud, or to rest cosily housed away in the "bosom
of his Maker," like a big, grown-up infant that he is, or else to be
howling at the top of his lungs hallelujahs!--he that could never raise a
note. And, if not so, certainly, out of compliment to the judgment of his
boon companions, he should be engaged in the dread alternative of sitting
astride a pair of balances and being "weighed and found wanting;" or
having been sent by the relentless Judge into everlasting torment "where
there is cursing and gnashing of teeth," he should be found there