I think he told me he and Tennyson were at one time intimate; but I distinctly remember a description he gave me of having heard the poet, when a young man, storming about in the first rapture of composing his poem of “Ulysses.”  One line of it Tennyson greatly revelled in,—­

    “And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.”

“He went through the streets,” said Thackeray, “screaming about his great Achilles, whom we knew,” as if we had all made the acquaintance of that gentleman, and were very proud of it.

One of the most comical and interesting occasions I remember, in connection with Thackeray, was going with him to a grand concert given fifteen or twenty years ago by Madame Sontag.  We sat near an entrance door in the hall, and every one who came in, male and female, Thackeray pretended to know, and gave each one a name and brief chronicle, as the presence flitted by.  It was in Boston, and as he had been in town only a day or two, and knew only half a dozen people in it, the biographies were most amusing.  As I happened to know several people who passed, it was droll enough to hear this great master of character give them their dues.  Mr. Choate moved along in his regal, affluent manner.  The large style of the man, so magnificent and yet so modest, at once arrested Thackeray’s attention, and he forbore to place him in his extemporaneous catalogue.  I remember a pallid, sharp-faced girl fluttering past, and how Thackeray exulted in the history of this “frail little bit of porcelain,” as he called her.  There was something in her manner that made him hate her, and he insisted she had murdered somebody on her way to the hall.  Altogether this marvellous prelude to the concert made a deep impression on Thackeray’s one listener, into whose ear he whispered his fatal insinuations.  There is one man still living and moving about the streets I walk in occasionally, whom I never encounter without almost a shudder, remembering as I do the unerring shaft which Thackeray sent that night into the unknown man’s character.

One day, many years ago, I saw him chaffing on the sidewalk in London, in front of the Athenaeum Club, with a monstrous-sized, “copiously ebriose” cabman, and I judged from the driver’s ludicrously careful way of landing the coin deep down in his breeches-pocket, that Thackeray had given him a very unusual fare.  “Who is your fat friend?” I asked, crossing over to shake hands with him.  “O, that indomitable youth is an old crony of mine,” he replied; and then, quoting Falstaff, “a goodly, portly man, i’ faith, and a corpulent, of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage.”  It was the manner of saying this, then, and there in the London street, the cabman moving slowly off on his sorry vehicle, with one eye (an eye dewy with gin and water, and a tear of gratitude, perhaps) on Thackeray, and the great man himself so jovial and so full of kindness!

It was a treat to hear him, as I once did, discourse of Shakespeare’s probable life in Stratford among his neighbors.  He painted, as he alone could paint, the great poet sauntering about the lanes without the slightest show of greatness, having a crack with the farmers, and in very earnest talk about the crops.  “I don’t believe,” said Thackeray, “that these village cronies of his ever looked upon him as the mighty poet,