drawings were refused, was almost unknown, and had to work hard for more than ten years before he received recognition.  Disappointed by his failure as an illustrator, he began his literary career by writing satires on society for Fraser’s Magazine.  This was the beginning of his success; but though the Yellowplush Papers, The Great Hoggarty Diamond, Catherine, The Fitz Boodlers, The Book of Snobs, Barry Lyndon, and various other immature works made him known to a few readers of Punch and of Fraser’s Magazine, it was not till the publication of Vanity Fair (1847-1848) that he began to be recognized as one of the great novelists of his day.  All his earlier works are satires, some upon society, others upon the popular novelists,—­Bulwer, Disraeli, and especially Dickens,—­with whose sentimental heroes and heroines he had no patience whatever.  He had married, meanwhile, in 1836, and for a few years was very happy in his home.  Then disease and insanity fastened upon his young wife, and she was placed in an asylum.  The whole after life of our novelist was darkened by this loss worse than death.  He became a man of the clubs, rather than of his own home, and though his wit and kindness made him the most welcome of clubmen, there was an undercurrent of sadness in all that he wrote.  Long afterwards he said that, though his marriage ended in shipwreck, he “would do it over again; for behold Love is the crown and completion of all earthly good.”

After the moderate success of Vanity Fair, Thackeray wrote the three novels of his middle life upon which his fame chiefly rests,—­Pendennis in 1850, Henry Esmond in 1852, and The Newcomes in 1855.  Dickens’s great popular success as a lecturer and dramatic reader had led to a general desire on the part of the public to see and to hear literary men, and Thackeray, to increase his income, gave two remarkable courses of lectures, the first being English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century, and the second The Four Georges,—­both courses being delivered with gratifying success in England and especially in America.  Dickens, as we have seen, was disappointed in America and vented his displeasure in outrageous criticism; but Thackeray, with his usual good breeding, saw only the best side of his generous entertainers, and in both his public and private utterances emphasized the virtues of the new land, whose restless energy seemed to fascinate him.  Unlike Dickens, he had no confidence in himself when he faced an audience, and like most literary men he disliked lecturing, and soon gave it up.  In 1860 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine, which prospered in his hands, and with a comfortable income he seemed just ready to do his best work for the world (which has always believed that he was capable of even better things than he ever wrote) when he died suddenly in 1863.  His body lies buried in Kensal Green, and only a bust does honor to his memory in Westminster Abbey.