power of making his money go very far, was anxious enough on the
subject. We may say now, that had he confined himself to his pen, he
would not have wanted while he lived, but would have left but little
behind him. That he was anxious we have seen, by his attempts to
subsidise his literary gains by a Government office. I cannot but think
that had he undertaken public duties for which he was ill qualified, and
received a salary which he could hardly have earned, he would have done
less for his fame than by reading to the public. Whether he did that
well or ill, he did it well enough for the money. The people who heard
him, and who paid for their seats, were satisfied with their
bargain,--as they were also in the case of Dickens; and I venture to say
that in becoming publicly a reader, neither did Dickens or Thackeray
"alter his position as a writer," and "that it was a change to be
justified," though the success of the old calling had in no degree
waned. What Thackeray did enabled him to leave a comfortable income for
his children, and one earned honestly, with the full approval of the
world around him.

Having saturated his mind with the literature of Queen Anne's time,--not
probably in the first instance as a preparation for _Esmond_, but in
such a way as to induce him to create an Esmond,--he took the authors
whom he knew so well as the subject for his first series of lectures. He
wrote _The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_ in 1851, while
he must have been at work on _Esmond_, and first delivered the course at
Willis's Rooms in that year. He afterwards went with these through many
of our provincial towns, and then carried them to the United States,
where he delivered them to large audiences in the winter of 1852 and
1853. Some few words as to the merits of the composition I will
endeavour to say in another place. I myself never heard him lecture, and
can therefore give no opinion of the performance. That which I have