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, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—­the “mean admiration of mean things”—­in the great world of London society; his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures.  There are no “heroes” in his books, no perfect characters.  Even his good women, such as Helen and Laura Pendennis, are capable of cruel injustice toward less fortunate sisters, like little Fanny; and Amelia Sedley is led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub and tyrannize over poor Dobbin.  The shabby miseries of life, the numbing and belittling influences of failure and poverty on the most generous