the pen, speaking of its master, Thackeray:

Since he my faithful service did engage,
To follow him through his queer pilgrimage
I've drawn and written many a line and page.

Caricatures I scribbled have, and rhymes,
And dinner-cards, and picture pantomimes,
And many little children's books at times.

I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain;
The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain;
The idle word that he'd wish back again.

I've helped him to pen many a line for bread.

It was thus he thought of his work. There had been caricatures, and
rhymes, and many little children's books; and then the lines written for
his bread, which, except that they were written for _Punch_, were hardly
undertaken with a more serious purpose. In all of it there was ample
seriousness, had he known it himself. What a tale of the restlessness,
of the ambition, of the glory, of the misfortunes of a great country is
given in the ballads of Peter the French drummer! Of that brain so full
of fancy the pen had lightly written all the fancies. He did not know it
when he was doing so, but with that word, fancy, he has described
exactly the gift with which his brain was specially endowed. If a writer
be accurate, or sonorous, or witty, or simply pathetic, he may, I think,
gauge his own powers. He may do so after experience with something of
certainty. But fancy is a gift which the owner of it cannot measure, and
the power of which, when he is using it, he cannot himself understand.
There is the same lambent flame flickering over everything he did, even
the dinner-cards and the picture pantomimes. He did not in the least
know what he put into those things. So it was with his verses. It was
only by degrees, when he was told of it by others, that he found that
they too were of infinite value to him in his profession.

The _Irish Sketch Book_ came out in 1843, in which he used, but only
half used, the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. He dedicates it to
Charles Lever, and in signing the dedication gave his own name. "Laying
aside," he says, "for a moment the travelling title of Mr. Titmarsh, let
me acknowledge these favours in my own name, and subscribe myself, &c.
&c., W. M. Thackeray." So he gradually fell into the declaration of his
own identity. In 1844 he made his journey to Turkey and Egypt,--_From
Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, as he called it, still using the old nom de
plume, but again si