ppointment than my own. He decided upon what
then seemed to him to be good business-reasons; and the same
consideration, doubtless, has since led him to accept statements
favorable to the side of the Rebellion.

As we were walking away, Thackeray said to me,--

"I am anxious that these things should be made public: suppose you write
a brief article, and send it to the 'Times'?"

"I would do so," I answered, "if there were any probability that it
would be published."

"I will try to arrange that," said he. "I know Mr. ----," (one of the
editors,) "and will call upon him at once. I will ask for the
publication of your letter as a personal favor to myself."

We parted at the door of a club-house, to meet again the same afternoon,
when Thackeray hoped to have the matter settled as he desired. He did
not, however, succeed in finding Mr. ----, but sent him a letter. I
thereupon went to work the next day, and prepared a careful, cold,
dispassionate statement, so condensed that it would have made less than
half a column of the "Times." I sent it to the editor, referring him to
Mr. Thackeray's letter in my behalf, and that is the last I ever heard
of it.

All of Thackeray's American friends will remember the feelings of pain
and regret with which they read his "Roundabout Paper" in the "Cornhill
Magazine," in (February, I think) 1862,--wherein he reproaches our
entire people as being willing to confiscate the stocks and other
property owned in this country by Englishmen, out of spite for their
disappointment in relation to the Trent affair, and directs his New-York
bankers to sell out all his investments, and remit the proceeds to
London, without delay. It was not his fierce denunciation of such
national dishonesty that we deprecated, but his apparent belief in its
possibility. We felt that he, of all Englishmen, should have understood
us better. We regretted, for Thackeray's own sake, that he had permitted
himself, in some spleenful moment, to commit an injustice, which would
sooner or later be apparent to his own mind.

Three months afterwards, (in May, 1862,) I was again in London. I had
not heard from Thackeray since the publication of the "Roundabout"
letter to his bankers, and was uncertain how far his evident ill-temper
on that occasion had subsided; but I owed him too much kindness, I
honored him too profoundly, not to pardon him, unasked, my share of the
offence. I found him installed in the new house he had bui