and his daughters to him were all the world,--the bairns of whom he
says, at the end of the _White Squall_ ballad;

I thought, as day was breaking,
My little girls were waking,
And smiling, and making
A prayer at home for me.

Nothing could have been more tender or endearing than his relations with
his children. But still there was a skeleton in his cupboard,--or rather
two skeletons. His home had been broken up by his wife's malady, and his
own health was shattered. When he was writing _Pendennis_, in 1849, he
had a severe fever, and then those spasms came, of which four or five
years afterwards he wrote to Mr. Reed. His home, as a home should be,
was never restored to him,--or his health. Just at that period of life
at which a man generally makes a happy exchange in taking his wife's
drawing-room in lieu of the smoking-room of his club, and assumes those
domestic ways of living which are becoming and pleasant for matured
years, that drawing-room and those domestic ways were closed against
him. The children were then no more than babies, as far as society was
concerned,--things to kiss and play with, and make a home happy if they
could only have had their mother with them. I have no doubt there were
those who thought that Thackeray was very jolly under his adversity.
Jolly he was. It was the manner of the man to be so,--if that continual
playfulness which was natural to him, lying over a melancholy which was
as continual, be compatible with jollity. He laughed, and ate, and
drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion. But I fancy
that he was far from happy. I remember once, when I was young,
receiving advice as to the manner in which I had better spend my
evenings; I was told that I ought to go home, drink tea, and read good