well believe that the givers of dinners were proud to have him among
their guests. He had opened his oyster,--with his pen, an achievement
which he cannot be said to have accomplished until _Vanity Fair_ had
come out. In inquiring about him from those who survive him, and knew
him well in those days, I always hear the same account. "If I could only
tell you the impromptu lines which fell from him!" "If I had only kept
the drawings from his pen, which used to be chucked about as though they
were worth nothing!" "If I could only remember the drolleries!" Had they
been kept, there might now be many volumes of these sketches, as to
which the reviewer says that their talent was "altogether of the Hogarth
kind." Could there be any kind more valuable? Like Hogarth, he could
always make his picture tell his story; though, unlike Hogarth, he had
not learned to draw. I have had sent to me for my inspection an album of
drawings and letters, which, in the course of twenty years, from 1829 to
1849, were despatched from Thackeray to his old friend Edward
Fitzgerald. Looking at the wit displayed in the drawings, I feel
inclined to say that had he persisted he would have been a second
Hogarth. There is a series of ballet scenes, in which "Flore et Zephyr"
are the two chief performers, which for expression and drollery exceed
anything that I know of the kind. The set in this book are lithographs,
which were published, but I do not remember to have seen them elsewhere.
There are still among us many who knew him well;--Edward Fitzgerald and
George Venables, James Spedding and Kinglake, Mrs. Procter,--the widow
of Barry Cornwall, who loved him well,--and Monckton Milnes, as he used
to be, whose touching lines written just after Thackeray's death will
close this volume, Frederick Pollock and Frank Fladgate, John Blackwood
and William Russell,--and they all tell the same story. Though he so
rarely talked, as good talkers do, and was averse to sit down to work,
there were always falling from his mouth and pen those little pearls.
Among the friends who had been kindest and dearest to him in the days of