th
his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing _The Snob_, a weekly
under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize poem _Timbuctoo_ of his
contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. Then he went abroad to
study art, passing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and filled
the albums of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward living
a bohemian existence in the Latin quarter at Paris, studying art in a
desultory way, and seeing men and cities; accumulating portfolios full
of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be used afterward to
greater advantage when he should settle upon his true medium of
expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of five hundred pounds a
year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_,
and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, Cruikshank's _Comic Almanac_,
_Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by
"Michael Angelo Titmarsh," _Yellowplush Papers_, and all manner of
skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the _Great
Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these were
collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish Sketch-Book_,
1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and it was not
until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity Fair_, in
monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing like the
general reputation that Dickens had reached at a bound. _Vanity Fair_
described itself, on its title-page, as "a novel without a hero." It was
also a novel without a plot--in the sense in which _Bleak House_ or
_Nicholas Nickleby_ had a plot--and in that respect it set the fashion
for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a transcript of life,
without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of the pleasantest
things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his characters have of
re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different books; just as, in
real life, people drop out of mind and then turn up again in other years
and places. _Vanity Fair_ is Thackeray's masterpiece, but it is not the
best introduction to his writings. There are no illusions in it, and,
to a young reader fresh from Scott's romances or Dickens's sympathetic
extravagances, it will seem hard and repellent. But men who, like
Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its
hollowness know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the
cant, the emptiness,