I happened to know personally (and let me modestly add, with some degree of sympathy) what he suffered editorially, when he had the charge and responsibility of a magazine.  With first-class contributors he got on very well, he said, but the extortioners and revilers bothered the very life out of him.  He gave me some amusing accounts of his misunderstandings with the “fair” (as he loved to call them), some of whom followed him up so closely with their poetical compositions, that his house (he was then living in Onslow Square) was never free of interruption.  “The darlings demanded,” said he, “that I should re-write, if I could not understand their ——­ nonsense and put their halting lines into proper form.”  “I was so appalled,” said he, “when they set upon me with their ‘ipics and their ipecacs,’ that you might have knocked me down with a feather, sir.  It was insupportable, and I fled away into France.”  As he went on, waxing drolly furious at the recollection of various editorial scenes, I could not help remembering Mr. Yellowplush’s recommendation, thus characteristically expressed:  “Take my advice, honrabble sir,—­listen to a humble footmin:  it’s genrally best in poatry to understand puffickly what you mean yourself, and to igspress your meaning clearly afterwoods,—­in the simpler words the better, p’r’aps.”

He took very great delight in his young daughter’s first contributions to the Cornhill, and I shall always remember how he made me get into a cab, one day in London, that I might hear, as we rode along, the joyful news he had to impart, that he had just been reading his daughter’s first paper, which was entitled “Little Scholars.”  “When I read it,” said he, “I blubbered like a child, it is so good, so simple, and so honest; and my little girl wrote it, every word of it.”

During his second visit to Boston I was asked to invite him to attend an evening meeting of a scientific club, which was to be held at the house of a distinguished member.  I was very reluctant to ask him to be present, for I knew he could be easily bored, and I was fearful that a prosy essay or geological speech might ensue, and I knew he would be exasperated with me, even although I were the innocent cause of his affliction.  My worst fears were realized.  We had hardly got seated, before a dull, bilious-looking old gentleman rose, and applied his auger with such pertinacity that we were all bored nearly to distraction.  I dared not look at Thackeray, but I felt that his eye was upon me.  My distress may be imagined, when he got up quite deliberately from the prominent place where a chair had been set for him, and made his exit very noiselessly into a small anteroom leading into the larger room, and in which no one was sitting.  The small apartment was dimly lighted, but he knew that I knew he was there.  Then commenced a series of pantomimic feats impossible to describe adequately.  He threw an imaginary person (myself, of course) upon the floor, and proceeded to stab him