“Lookee, lad, lookee quick—­that’s him!  He eats three sheep every day and all the children he can get!”

“And that’s all I had to do with the Battle of Waterloo,” said “Old Thack,” forty years after.  But you will never believe it after reading those masterly touches concerning the battle, in “Vanity Fair.”

Young Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse School, where he was considered rather a dull boy.  He was big and good-natured, and read novels when he should have studied arithmetic.  This tendency to “play off” stuck to him at Cambridge—­where he did not remain long enough to get a degree, but to the relief of his tutors went off on a tour through Europe.

Travel as a means of education is a very seductive bit of sophistry.  Invalids whom the doctors can not cure, and scholars whom teachers can not teach, are often advised to take “a change.”  Still there is reason in it.

In England Thackeray was intent on law; at Paris he received a strong bent toward art; but when he reached Weimar and was introduced at the Court of Letters and came into the living presence of Goethe, he caught the infection and made a plan for translating Schiller.

Schiller dead was considered in Germany a greater man than Goethe living, as if it were an offense to live and a virtue to die.  And young William Makepeace wrote home to his mother that Schiller was the greatest man that ever lived and that he was going to translate his books and give them to England.

No doubt there are certain people born with a tendency to infectiousness in regard to certain diseases; so there are those who catch the literary mania on slight exposure.

“I’ve got it,” said Thackeray, and so he had.

He went back to England and made groggy efforts at Blackstone, and Somebody’s Digest, and What’s-His-Name’s Compendium, but all the time he scribbled and sketched.

The young man had come into possession of a goodly fortune from his father’s estate—­enough to yield him an income of over two thousand dollars a year.  But bad investments and signing security for friends took the money the way that money usually goes when held by a man who has not earned it.

“Talk about riches having wings,” said Thackeray; “my fortune had pinions like a condor, and flew like a carrier-pigeon.”

When Thackeray was thirty he was eking out a meager income writing poems, reviews, criticisms and editorials.  His wife was a confirmed invalid, a victim of mental darkness, and his sorrows and anxieties were many.

He was known as a bright writer, yet London is full of clever, unsuccessful men.  But in Thackeray’s thirty-eighth year “Vanity Fair” came out, and it was a success from the first.

In “Yesterdays With Authors,” Mr. Fields says:  “I once made a pilgrimage with Thackeray to the various houses where his books had been written; and I remember when we came to Young Street, Kensington, he said, with mock gravity, ’Down on your knees, you rogue, for here “Vanity Fair” was penned; and I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself.’”