audience.  At a quarter past seven I called for him, and found him not only unshaved and undressed for the evening, but rapturously absorbed in making a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a passage in Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, for a lady, which illustration,—­a charming one, by the way, for he was greatly skilled in drawing,—­he vowed he would finish before he would budge an inch in the direction of the (I omit the adjective) Melodeon.  A comical incident occurred just as he was about leaving the hall, after his first lecture in Boston.  A shabby, ungainly looking man stepped briskly up to him in the anteroom, seized his hand and announced himself as “proprietor of the Mammoth Rat,” and proposed to exchange season tickets.  Thackeray, with the utmost gravity, exchanged cards and promised to call on the wonderful quadruped next day.

Thackeray’s motto was ’Avoid performing to-day, if possible, what can be postponed till to-morrow.’  Although he received large sums for his writings, he managed without much difficulty to keep his expenditures fully abreast, and often in advance of, his receipts.  His pecuniary object in visiting America the second time was to lay up, as he said, a “pot of money” for his two daughters, and he left the country with more than half his lecture engagements unfulfilled.  He was to have visited various cities in the Middle and Western States; but he took up a newspaper one night, in his hotel in New York, before retiring, saw a steamer advertised to sail the next morning for England, was seized with a sudden fit of homesickness, rang the bell for his servant, who packed up his luggage that night, and the next day he sailed.  The first intimation I had of his departure was a card which he sent by the pilot of the steamer, with these words upon it:  “Good by, Fields; good by, Mrs. Fields; God bless everybody, says W.M.T.”  Of course he did not avail himself of the opportunity afforded him for receiving a very large sum in America, and he afterwards told me in London, that if Mr. Astor had offered him half his fortune if he would allow that particular steamer to sail without him, he should have declined the well-intentioned but impossible favor, and gone on board.

No man has left behind him a tenderer regard for his genius and foibles among his friends than Thackeray.  He had a natural love of good which nothing could wholly blur or destroy.  He was a most generous critic of the writings of his contemporaries, and no one has printed or spoken warmer praise of Dickens, in one sense his great rival, than he.

Thackeray was not a voluminous correspondent, but what exquisite letters he has left in the hands of many of his friends!  “Should any letters arrive,” he says in a little missive from Philadelphia, “addressed to the care of J.T.F. for the ridiculous author of this, that, and the other, F. is requested to send them to Mercantile Library, Baltimore.  My ghostly enemy will be delighted (or will gnash his teeth with rage) to hear that the lectures in the capital of Pa. have been very well attended.  No less than 750 people paid at the door on Friday night, and though last night there was a storm of snow so furious that no reasonable mortal could face it, 500 (at least) amiable maniacs were in the lecture-room, and wept over the fate of the last king of these colonies.”