be written. It was his wish to live in his works alone: that wish
his descendants respect; and we must probably regard the Letters to
Mr. and Mrs. Brookfield as the last private and authentic record of
the man which will be given, at least to this generation. In these
Letters all sympathetic readers will find the man they have long
known from his writings--the man with a heart so tender that the
world often drove him back into a bitterness of opposition, into an
assumed hardness and defensive cynicism. There are readers so
unluckily constituted that they can see nothing in Thackeray but
this bitterness, this cruel sense of meanness and power of analysing
shabby emotions, sneaking vanities, contemptible ambitions. All of
us must often feel with regret that he allowed himself to be made
too unhappy by the spectacle of failings so common in the world he
knew best, that he dwelt on them too long and lashed them too
complacently. One hopes never to read "Lovel the Widower" again,
and one gladly skips some of the speeches of the Old Campaigner in
"The Newcomes." They are terrible, but not more terrible than life.
Yet it is hard to understand how Mr. Ruskin, for example, can let
such scenes and characters hide from his view the kindness,
gentleness, and pity of Thackeray's nature. The Letters must open
all eyes that are not wilfully closed, and should at last overcome
every prejudice.

In the Letters we see a man literally hungering and thirsting after
affection, after love--a man cut off by a cruel stroke of fate from
his natural solace, from the centre of a home.


"God took from me a lady dear,"