r the time now in question. My
acquaintance with him was quite late in his life. But he has told me
something of it, and I have heard from those who lived with him how
continual were his sufferings. In 1854, he says in one of his letters to
Mr. Reed,--the only private letters of his which I know to have been
published; "I am to-day just out of bed after another, about the
dozenth, severe fit of spasms which I have had this year. My book would
have been written but for them." His work was always going on, but
though not fuller of matter,--that would have been almost
impossible,--would have been better in manner had he been delayed
neither by suffering nor by that palsying of the energies which
suffering produces.

This ought to have been the happiest period of his life, and should have
been very happy. He had become fairly easy in his circumstances. He had
succeeded in his work, and had made for himself a great name. He was
fond of popularity, and especially anxious to be loved by a small circle
of friends. These good things he had thoroughly achieved. Immediately
after the publication of _Vanity Fair_ he stood high among the literary
heroes of his country, and had endeared himself especially to a special
knot of friends. His face and figure, his six feet four in height, with
his flowing hair, already nearly gray, and his broken nose, his broad
forehead and ample chest, encountered everywhere either love or respect;
and his daughters to him were all the world,--the bairns of whom he
says, at the end of the _White Squall_ ballad;

I thought, as day was breaking,
My little girls were waking,
And smiling, and making
A prayer at home for me.

Nothing could have been more tender or endearing than his relations with
his children. But still there was a skeleton in his cupboard,--or rather
two skeletons. His home had been broken up by his wife's malady, and his
own health was shattered. When he was writing _Pendennis_, in 1849, he
had a severe fever, and then those spasms came, of which four or five
years afterwards he wrote to Mr. Reed. His home, as a home should be,
was never restored to him,--or his health. Just at that period of life
at which a man generally makes a happy exchange in taking his wife's
drawing-room in lieu of the smoking-room of his club, and assumes those
domestic ways of living which are becoming and pleasant for matured
years, that drawing-room and those domestic ways were closed