the age of twenty-six Thackeray wrote _The History of Samuel Titmarsh_
and the _Great Hoggarty Diamond_. It was produced under very
melancholy conditions, in the most unfavourable form of publication,
and it was mangled by editorial necessities. And yet it can still be
read and re-read as one of Thackeray's masterpieces, trifling and
curtailed as it is (for it may be printed in one hundred pages); it is
as full of wit, humour, scathing insight, and fine pathos in the midst
of burlesque, as is _Vanity Fair_ itself. It is already Thackeray in
all his strength, with his "Snobs," his "Nobs," his fierce satire, and
his exquisite style.

Modern romance has no purer, more pathetic, or simpler page than the
tale of the death of poor Samuel Titmarsh's first child. Though it is,
as it deserves to be, a household word, the passage must be quoted here
as a specimen of faultless and beautiful style.


It was not, however, destined that she and her child should inhabit
that little garret. We were to leave our lodgings on Monday morning;
but on Saturday evening the child was seized with convulsions, and all
Sunday the mother watched and prayed for it: but it pleased God to take
the innocent infant from us, and on Sunday, at midnight, it lay a
corpse in its mother's bosom. Amen. We have other children, happy and
well, now round about us, and from the father's heart the memory of
this little thing has almost faded; but I do believe that every day of
her life the mother thinks of her first-born that was with her for so
short a while: many and many a time she has taken her daughters to the
grave, in Saint Bride's, where he lies buried; and she wears still at
her neck a little, little lock of gold hair, which she took from the
head of the infant as he lay smiling in his coffin. It has happened to