among us still. But this is not the
strain wherewith to greet the friend newly arrived on our shores. How it
rejoices me to behold you in old England.'" And so the satirist goes on
with Mr. Honeyman the clergyman. Mr. Honeyman the clergyman has been
already mentioned, in that extract made in our first chapter from _Lovel
the Widower_. It was he who assisted another friend, "with his wheedling
tongue," in inducing Thackeray to purchase that "neat little literary
paper,"--called then _The Museum_, but which was in truth _The National
Standard_. In describing Barnes Newcome, the colonel's relative,
Thackeray in the same scene attacks the sharpness of the young men of
business of the present day. There were, or were to be, some
transactions with Rummun Loll, and Barnes Newcome, being in doubt, asks
the colonel a question or two as to the certainty of the Rummun's money,
much to the colonel's disgust. "The young man of business had dropped
his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite unaffectedly,
good-naturedly, and selfishly. Had you talked to him for a week you
would not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the
colonel regarded him. Here was a young fellow as keen as the oldest
curmudgeon,--a lad with scarce a beard to his chin, that would pursue
his bond as rigidly as Shylock." "Barnes Newcome never missed a church,"
he goes on, "or dressing for dinner. He never kept a tradesman waiting
for his money. He seldom drank too much, and never was late for
business, or huddled over his toilet, however brief his sleep or severe
his headache. In a word, he was as scrupulously whited as any sepulchre
in the whole bills of mortality." Thackeray had lately seen some Barnes
Newcome when he wrote that.

It is all satire; but there is generally a touch of pathos even through
the satire. It is satire when Miss Quigley, the governess in Park
Street, falls in love with the old colonel after some dim fashion of her
own. "When she is walking with her little charges in the Park, faint
signals of welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear colonel
amidst a thousand horsemen." The colonel had drunk a glass of wine with
her after his stately fashion, and the foolish old maid thinks too much
of it. Then we are told how she knits purses for him, "as she sits alone
in the schoolroom,--high up in that lone house, when the little ones are
long since asleep,--before her dismal little tea-tray, and her little
desk co