but misery; the initiated a man shunned and banned by his fellows. Oh!'
said Bullwig, clasping his hands, and throwing his fine i's up to the
chandelier, 'the curse of Pwomethus descends upon his wace. Wath and
punishment pursue them from genewation to genewation! Wo to genius, the
heaven-scaler, the fire-stealer! Wo and thrice-bitter desolation! Earth
is the wock on which Zeus, wemorseless, stwetches his withing
wictim;--men, the vultures that feed and fatten on him. Ai, ai! it is
agony eternal,--gwoaning and solitawy despair! And you, Yellowplush,
would penetwate these mystewies; you would waise the awful veil, and
stand in the twemendous Pwesence. Beware, as you value your peace,
beware! Withdraw, wash Neophyte! For heaven's sake! O for heaven's
sake!'--Here he looked round with agony;--'give me a glass of
bwandy-and-water, for this clawet is beginning to disagwee with me.'" It
was thus that Thackeray began that vein of satire on his contemporaries
of which it may be said that the older he grew the more amusing it was,
and at the same time less likely to hurt the feelings of the author
satirised.

The next tale of any length from Thackeray's pen, in the magazine, was
that called _Catherine_, which is the story taken from the life of a
wretched woman called Catherine Hayes. It is certainly not pleasant
reading, and was not written with a pleasant purpose. It assumes to have
come from the pen of Ikey Solomon, of Horsemonger Lane, and its object
is to show how disgusting would be the records of thieves, cheats, and
murderers if their doings and language were described according to their
nature instead of being handled in such a way as to create sympathy, and
therefore imitation. Bulwer's _Eugene Aram_, Harrison Ainsworth's _Jack
Sheppard_, and Dickens' Nancy were in his mind, and it was thus that he
preached his sermon against the selection of such heroes and heroines by
the novelists of the day. "Be it granted," he says, in his epilogue,