he world, so that, whether of a Cicero, or of a
Goethe, or of our own Johnson, there has been a story to tell. Of
Thackeray no life has been written; and though they who knew him,--and
possibly many who did not,--are conversant with anecdotes of the man,
who was one so well known in society as to have created many anecdotes,
yet there has been no memoir of his life sufficient to supply the wants
of even so small a work as this purports to be. For this the reason may
simply be told. Thackeray, not long before his death, had had his taste
offended by some fulsome biography. Paragraphs, of which the eulogy
seemed to have been the produce rather of personal love than of inquiry
or judgment, disgusted him, and he begged of his girls that when he
should have gone there should nothing of the sort be done with his name.

We can imagine how his mind had worked, how he had declared to himself
that, as by those loving hands into which his letters, his notes, his
little details,--his literary remains, as such documents used to be
called,--might naturally fall, truth of his foibles and of his
shortcomings could not be told, so should not his praises be written, or
that flattering portrait be limned which biographers are wont to
produce. Acting upon these instructions, his daughters,--while there
were two living, and since that the one surviving,--have carried out the
order which has appeared to them to be sacred. Such being the case, it
certainly is not my purpose now to write what may be called a life of
Thackeray. In this preliminary chapter I will give such incidents and
anecdotes of his life as will tell the reader perhaps all about him that
a reader is entitled to ask. I will tell how he became an author, and
will say how first he worked and struggled, and then how he worked and
prospered, and became a household word in English literature;--how, in
this way, he passed through that course of mingled failure and success
which, though the literary aspirant may suffer, is probably better both
for the writer and for the writings than unclouded early glory. The
suffering no doubt is acute, and a touch of melancholy, perhaps of
indignation, may be given to words which have been written while the
heart has been too full of its own wrongs; but this is better than the
continued note of triumph which is still heard in the final voices of
the spoilt child of literature, even when they are losing their music.
Then I will tell how Thackeray d