investments,
and partly by careless living, his means were spent, and he took up
writing as a profession. The comic was his forte, and his early pieces,
written under the pseudonym of Michael Angelo Fitzmarsh and George Fitz
Boodle, are broadly humorous, but by no means in his later finished style.
_The Great Hoggarty Diamond_ (1841) did not disclose his full powers.

In 1841, _Punch_, a weekly comic illustrated sheet, was begun, and it
opened to Thackeray a field which exactly suited him. Short scraps of
comedy, slightly connected sketches, and the weekly tale of brick, chimed
with his humor, and made him at once a favorite. The best of these serial
contributions were _The Snob Papers_: they are as fine specimens of
humorous satire as exist in the language. But these would not have made
him famous, as they did not disclose his power as a novelist.

VANITY FAIR.--This was done by his _Vanity Fair_, which was published, in
monthly numbers, between 1846 and 1848. It was at once popular, and is the
most artistic of all his works. He called it a novel without a hero, and
he is right; the mind repudiates all aspirants for the post, and settles
upon poor Major Sugar-Plums as the best man in it. He could not have said
_without a heroine_, for does not the world since ring with the fame of
Becky Sharpe, the cleverest and wickedest little woman in England? The
virtuous reader even is sorry that Becky must come to grief, as, with a
proper respect to morality, the novelist makes her.

Never had the Vanity Fair of European society received so scathing a
dissection; and its author was immediately recognized as one of the
greatest living satirists and novelists. If he adheres more to the old
school of Fielding, who was his model, in his plots and handling of the
story, he was evidently original in his satire.

In 1847, upon the completion of this work, he began his _History of
Pendennis_, in serial numbers, in which he presents the hero, Arthur
Pendennis, as an average youth of the day, full of faults and foibles, but
likewise generous and repentant. Here he enlists the sympathies which one
never feels for perfection; and here, too, he portrays female loveliness
and endurance in his Mrs. Pendennis and Laura. Arthur is a purer Tom Jones
and Laura a superior Sophia Western.

In 1851 he gave a course of lectures, repeated in America the next year,
on "the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century." There was no one
better fitted