Many were the doubts and anxieties which, for my last play had been a failure, now beset us, and plan after plan I tried for procuring work and adding to our dwindling stock of money.  By a hard day’s labour at translating from foreign languages for the booksellers, I could earn a few shillings—­so few that a week’s work would hardly bring me a guinea.  Hard times were not over with us till some time after the Baroness Bernstein’s death (she left everything she had to her dear nephew, Henry Esmond Warrington), when my uncle Sir Miles procured me a post as one of his Majesty’s commissioners for licensing hackney coaches.  His only child was dead, and I was now heir to the Baronetcy.

Then one morning, before almost I had heard of my uncle’s illness, a lawyer waits upon me at my lodgings in Bloomsbury, and salutes me by the name of Sir George Warrington.

The records of a prosperous country life are easily told.  Obedient tenants bowed and curtsied as we went to church, and we drove to visit our neighbours in the great family coach.

Shall I ever see the old mother again, I wonder!  When Hal was in England, we sent her pictures of both her sons painted by the admirable Sir Joshua Reynolds.  We never let Harry rest until he had asked Hetty in marriage.  He obeyed, and it was she who declined.  “She had always,” she wrote, “the truest regard for him from the dear old time when they had met almost children together.  But she would never leave her father.  When it pleased God to take him, she hoped she would be too old to think of bearing any other name but her own.”

My brother Hal is still a young man, being little more than 50, and Hetty is now a staid little lady.  There are days when she looks surprisingly young and blooming.  Why should Theo and I have been so happy, and thou so lonely?

* * * * *

Vanity Fair

“Vanity Fair” was published in 1848, and at once placed its author in the front rank of novelists.  It was followed by “Pendennis” in 1850, “Esmond” in 1852, “The Newcomes” in 1855, and “The Virginians” in 1859.  Some critics profess to see manifested in “Vanity Fair” a certain sharpness and sarcasm in Thackeray’s character which does not appear in his later works, but however much the author may have mellowed in his later novels, “Vanity Fair” continues to be his acknowledged masterpiece, and of all the characters he drew, Becky Sharp is the best known.

I.—­Miss Sharp Opens Her Campaign

One sunshiny morning in June there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach with two fat horses in blazing harness.

“It is Mrs. Sedley’s coach, sister,” said Miss Jemima.  The day of departure had come, and Miss Amelia Sedley, an amiable young lady, was glad to go home, and yet woefully sad at leaving school.  Miss Rebecca Sharp, whose father had been an artist, accompanied Amelia, to pass a week with her friend in Russell Square before she entered upon her duties as governess in Sir Pitt Crawley’s family.