, which failed. There
seem to have been two newspapers in which he was so concerned, _The
National Standard_ and _The Constitutional_. On the latter he was
engaged with his stepfather, and in carrying that on he lost the last of
his money. _The National Standard_ had been running for some weeks when
Thackeray joined it, and lost his money in it. It ran only for little
more than twelve months, and then, the money having gone, the periodical
came to an end. I know no road to fortune more tempting to a young man,
or one that with more certainty leads to ruin. Thackeray, who in a way
more or less correct, often refers in his writings, if not to the
incidents, at any rate to the remembrances of his own life, tells us
much of the story of this newspaper in _Lovel the Widower_. "They are
welcome," says the bachelor, "to make merry at my charges in respect of
a certain bargain which I made on coming to London, and in which, had I
been Moses Primrose purchasing green spectacles, I could scarcely have
been more taken in. My Jenkinson was an old college acquaintance, whom I
was idiot enough to imagine a respectable man. The fellow had a very
smooth tongue and sleek sanctified exterior. He was rather a popular
preacher, and used to cry a good deal in the pulpit. He and a queer wine
merchant and bill discounter, Sherrick by name, had somehow got
possession of that neat little literary paper, _The Museum_, which
perhaps you remember, and this eligible literary property my friend
Honeyman, with his wheedling tongue, induced me to purchase." Here is
the history of Thackeray's money, told by himself plainly enough, but
with no intention on his part of narrating an incident in his own life
to the public. But the drollery of the circumstances, his own mingled
folly and young ambition, struck him as being worth narration, and the
more forcibly as he remembered all the ins and outs of his own
reflections at the time,--how he had meant to enchant the world, and
make his fortune. There was literary capital in it of which he could
make use after so many years. Then he tells us of this ambition, and of
the folly of it; and at the same time puts forward the excuses to be
made for it. "I daresay I gave myself airs as editor of that confounded
_Museum_, and proposed to educate the public taste, to diffuse morality
and sound literature throughout the nation, and to pocket a liberal
salary in return for my services. I daresay I printed my own sonnets,