A cultivatin' every kind of po'try,

There may, perhaps, have been a mistake in a line, but the poem has been
handed down with fair correctness over a period of forty years. He was
always versifying. He once owed me five pounds seventeen shillings and
sixpence, his share of a dinner bill at Richmond. He sent me a cheque
for the amount in rhyme, giving the proper financial document on the
second half of a sheet of note paper. I gave the poem away as an
autograph, and now forget the lines. This was all trifling, the reader
will say. No doubt. Thackeray was always trifling, and yet always
serious. In attempting to understand his character it is necessary for
you to bear within your own mind the idea that he was always, within his
own bosom, encountering melancholy with buffoonery, and meanness with
satire. The very spirit of burlesque dwelt within him,--a spirit which
does not see the grand the less because of the travesties which it is
always engendering.

In his youthful,--all but boyish,--days in London, he delighted to "put
himself up" at the Bedford, in Covent Garden. Then in his early married
days he lived in Albion Street, and from thence went to Great Coram
Street, till his household there was broken up by his wife's illness. He
afterwards took lodgings in St. James's Chambers, and then a house in
Young Street, Kensington. Here he lived from 1847, when he was achieving
his great triumph with _Vanity Fair_, down to 1853, when he removed to a
house which he bought in Onslow Square. In Young Street there had come
to lodge opposite to him an Irish gentleman, who, on the part of his
injured country, felt very angry with Thackeray. _The Irish Sketch Book_
had not been complimentary, nor were the descriptions which Thackeray
had given generally of Irishmen; and there was extant an absurd idea
that in his abominable heroine Catherine Hayes he had alluded to Miss