lection of
Mr. Thackeray's sketches and drawings has been prepared for publication.

When the news spread over England of Mr. Thackeray's sudden death, it was
felt that a personal loss had been sustained by every one who cared for
books and for style. Other men might write themselves out, their
invention might become weary; and, indeed, Mr. Thackeray himself felt
this fatigue. He wished he could get some one to do "the business" of
his stories he told the world in a "Roundabout Paper." The love-making
parts of "the business" annoyed him, and made him blush, in the privacy
of his study, "as if he were going into an apoplexy." Some signs of this
distaste for the work of the novelist were obvious, perhaps, in "Philip,"
though they did not mar the exquisite tenderness and charm of "Denis
Duval." However that might be, his inimitable style was as fresh as
ever, with its passages of melancholy, its ease, its flexible strength,
and unlooked-for cadences. It was the talk about life, and the tone of
that talk, which fell silent when Thackeray died, that we all felt as an
irremediable loss. There is an old story that Pindar had never in his
lifetime written an ode in praise of Persephone, the goddess of death and
the dead, and that after he had departed from among living men, his shade
communicated to the priests a new hymn on the Queen of Hades. The works
of great writers published after their decease have somewhat of the charm
of this fabled hymn; they are voices, familiar and unlocked for, out of
the silence. They are even stranger, when they have such a slight and
homelike interest as the trifles that fell unheeded from the pen or
pencil of one who has done great things in poetry or art. Mr.
Thackeray's sketches in the "Orphan of Pimlico" are of this
quality--caricatures thrown off to amuse children who are now grown men
and women. They have the mark of the old unmistakable style, humorous
and sad, and, as last remains, they are to be welcomed and treasured.

Mr. Thackeray's skill with the pencil bore very curious relations to his
mastery of the other art, in which lay his strength, but to which perhaps
he never gave his love. Everyone has heard how, when a young man, he was
anxious to illustrate "Pickwick," which found more fitting artists in
Seymour and H. K. Browne. Mr. Thackeray seems to have been well aware of
the limitations of his own power as a draughtsman. In one of his
"Roundabout Papers" he described