his strugglings he once mentioned three to me,--Matthew Higgins, or
Jacob Omnium as he was more popularly called; William Stirling, who
became Sir William Maxwell; and Russell Sturgis, who is now the senior
partner in the great house of Barings. Alas, only the last of these
three is left among us! Thackeray was a man of no great power of
conversation. I doubt whether he ever shone in what is called general
society. He was not a man to be valuable at a dinner-table as a good
talker. It was when there were but two or three together that he was
happy himself and made others happy; and then it would rather be from
some special piece of drollery that the joy of the moment would come,
than from the discussion of ordinary topics. After so many years his old
friends remember the fag-ends of the doggerel lines which used to drop
from him without any effort on all occasions of jollity. And though he
could be very sad,--laden with melancholy, as I think must have been the
case with him always,--the feeling of fun would quickly come to him, and
the queer rhymes would be poured out as plentifully as the sketches were
made. Here is a contribution which I find hanging in the memory of an
old friend, the serious nature of whose literary labours would certainly
have driven such lines from his mind, had they not at the time caught
fast hold of him:

In the romantic little town of Highbury
My father kept a circulatin' library;
He followed in his youth that man immortal, who
Conquered the Frenchmen on the plains of Waterloo.
Mamma was an inhabitant of Drogheda,
Very good she was to darn and to embroider.
In the famous island of Jamaica,
For thirty years I've been a sugar-baker;
And here I sit, the Muses' 'appy vot'ry,