at a railway. It is to that that he is brought by applying himself to a
business which requires only a table and chair, with pen, ink, and
paper! It is to that which he is brought by venturing to believe that he
has been gifted with powers of imagination, creation, and expression.

The young man who makes the attempt knows that he must run the chance.
He is well aware that nine must fail where one will make his running
good. So much as that does reach his ears, and recommends itself to his
common sense. But why should it not be he as well as another? There is
always some lucky one winning the prize. And this prize when it has been
won is so well worth the winning! He can endure starvation,--so he tells
himself,--as well as another. He will try. But yet he knows that he has
but one chance out of ten in his favour, and it is only in his happier
moments that he flatters himself that that remains to him. Then there
falls upon him,--in the midst of that labour which for its success
especially requires that a man's heart shall be light, and that he be
always at his best,--doubt and despair. If there be no chance, of what
use is his labour?

Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

and amuse himself after that fashion? Thus the very industry which alone
could give him a chance is discarded. It is so that the young man feels
who, with some slight belief in himself and with many doubts, sits down
to commence the literary labour by which he hopes to live.

So it was, no doubt, with Thackeray. Such were his hopes and his
fears;--with a resolution of which we can well understand that it should
have waned at times, of earning his bread, if he did not make his
fortune, in the world of literature. One has not to look far for
evidence of the condition I have described,--that it was so, Amaryllis
and all. How or when he made his very first attempt in London, I have
not learned; but he had not probably spent his money without forming
"press" acquaintances, and had thus found an aperture for the thin end
of the wedge. He wrote for _The Constitutional_, of which he was part
proprietor, beginning his work for that paper as a correspondent from
Paris. For a while he was connected with _The Times_ newspaper, though
his work there did not I think amount to much. His first regular
employment was on _Fraser's Magazine_, when Mr. Fraser's shop was in
Regent Street, when Oliver Yorke was the presum