m you
hate now. Look at a file of your sister's! how you clung to each
other until you quarrelled about the twenty pound legacy.... Vows,
love promises, confidence, gratitude! how queerly they read after a
while.... The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded
utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so
that you might write on it to somebody else."

Again:--

"Many persons who let lodgings in Brighton have been servants
themselves, are retired housekeepers, tradesfolk, and the like.
With these surrounding individuals Hannah, treated on a footing of
equality, bringing to her mistress accounts of their various goings
on; 'how No. 6 was let; how No. 9 had not paid his rent again; how
the first floor at 27 had game almost every day, and made-dishes
from Mutton's; how the family who had taken Mrs. Bugsby's had left,
as usual, after the very first night, the poor little infant
blistered all over with bites on its dear little face; how the Miss
Leary's were going on shameful with the two young men, actually in
their sitting-room, mum, where one of them offered Miss Laura Leary
a cigar; how Mrs. Cribb _still_ went cuttin' pounds and pounds of
meat off the lodgers' jints, emptying their tea-caddies, actually
reading their letters. Sally had been told so by Polly, the Cribb's
maid, who was kep', how that poor child was kep,' hearing language
perfectly hawful!'"

Thus in all Thackeray's descriptions there is more or less satire. He
was always making pincushions, into which he was plunging his little
points of sarcasm, and owing to his confining himself to this kind of
humour he avoids the common danger of missing his mark. He is
occasionally liberal of oaths and imprecations, and when any one of his
characters is offended, he generally relieves his feelings by uttering
"horrid curses." Barnes Newcome sends up "a perfect _feu d'artifice_ of
oaths." But he is entirely free from indelicacy, and merely elegantly
shadows forth the Eton form of punishment, as that "which none but a
cherub can escape." In this respect he seems to have set before him the
example of Mr. Honeyman, of whom he says he had "a thousand anecdotes,
laughable riddles and droll stories (of the utmost correctness, you
understand.)"

Perhaps one of his least successful attempts at humour is a collection
of fables at th