ind, and I have a kind
of pity for all who were born so recently as not to have heard and
understood Thackeray's Lectures. But they can read him, and I beg of
them to try and appreciate the tenderer phase of his genius, as well as
the sarcastic one. He teaches many lessons to young men, and here is one
of them, which I quote _memoriter_ from "Barry Lyndon": "Do you not, as
a boy, remember waking of bright summer mornings and finding your mother
looking over you? had not the gaze of her tender eyes stolen into your
senses long before you woke, and cast over your slumbering spirit a
sweet spell of peace, and love, and fresh-springing joy?" My dear
friend, John Brown, of Edinburgh (whom may God long preserve to both
countries where he is so loved and honored), chronicles this touching
incident. "We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in
December, when Thackeray was walking with two friends along the Dean
Road, to the west of Edinburgh,--one of the noblest outlets to any city.
It was a lovely evening; such a sunset as one never forgets; a rich dark
bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills,
lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills
there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color,
lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every
object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of
Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this
pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the granary below, was
so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was,
unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at
it silently. As they gazed, Thackeray gave utterance in a tremulous,
gentle, and rapid voice to what all were feeling, in the word,
'CALVARY!' The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other
things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he
seldom did, of divine things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of
salvation, expressing his simple faith in God and in his Saviour."

Thackeray was found dead in his bed on Christmas morning, and he
probably died without pain. His mother and his daughters were sleeping
under the same roof when he passed away alone. Dickens told me that,
looking on him as he lay in his coffin, he wondered that the figure he
had known in life as one of such noble presence could seem so shrunken
and waste