O Peace!—­but there is Major Monk,
  At variance with his wife.  O Peace!—­
  And that great German, Van der Trunk,
  And that great talker, Miss Apreece. 
  O Peace! so dear to poets’ quills—­
  They’re just beginning their quadrilles. 
  O Peace! our greatest renovator—­
  I wonder where I put my waiter. 
  O Peace!—­but here my ode I’ll cease! 
  I have no peace to write of Peace.

LETTERS FROM THACKERAY
[Sidenote:  Thackeray]

Tuesday, November 1848.

GOOD-NIGHT, MY DEAR MADAM,

Since I came home from dining with Mr. Morier, I have been writing a letter to Mr. T. Carlyle and thinking about other things as well as the letter all the time; and I have read over a letter I received to-day which apologizes for everything and whereof the tremulous author ceaselessly doubts and misgives.  Who knows whether she is not converted by Joseph Bullar by this time.  She is a sister of mine, and her name is God bless her.

Wednesday.—­I was at work until seven o’clock; not to very much purpose, but executing with great labour and hardship the day’s work.  Then I went to dine with Dr. Hall, the crack doctor here, a literate man, a traveller, and otherwise a kind bigwig.  After dinner we went to hear Mr. Sortain lecture, of whom you may perhaps have heard me speak, as a great, remarkable orator and preacher of the Lady Huntingdon Connexion. (The paper is so greasy that I am forced to try several pens and manners of handwriting, but none will do.) We had a fine lecture, with brilliant Irish metaphors and outbursts of rhetoric, addressed to an assembly of mechanics, shopboys, and young women, who could not, and perhaps had best not, understand that flashy speaker.  It was about the origin of nations he spoke, one of those big themes on which a man may talk eternally and with a never-ending outpouring of words; and he talked magnificently, about the Arabs for the most part, and tried to prove that because the Arabs acknowledged their descent from Ishmael, or Esau, therefore the Old Testament history was true.  But the Arabs may have had Esau for a father and yet the bears may not have eaten up the little children for quizzing Elisha’s bald head.  As I was writing to Carlyle last night (I haven’t sent the letter as usual, and shall not most likely), Saint Stephen was pelted to death by Old Testaments, and our Lord was killed like a felon by the law, which He came to repeal.  I was thinking about Joseph Bullar’s doctrine after I went to bed, founded on what I cannot but think a blasphemous asceticism, which has obtained in the world ever so long, and which is disposed to curse, hate, and undervalue the world altogether.  Why should we?  What we see here of this world is but an expression of God’s will, so to speak—­a beautiful earth and sky and sea—­beautiful affections and sorrows, wonderful changes and developments of creations, suns rising, stars shining, birds singing, clouds and shadows