There are three classes of people who take an interest in letters.  There are the persons who read books; the much larger class which reads reviews; and, again, they who merely skim over the advertisements of new works.  The last set live in a constant enjoyment of the pleasure of expectation; they pretend to themselves that some day they will find time to peruse the volumes in the birth of which they are interested, but, in fact, they live in the future.  They are a month ahead of their friends who read reviews, and six months of the students who actually devour books themselves.  Not only these eager lovers of literary “shop,” but all friends of English humour, must be glad to see that a collection of Mr. Thackeray’s sketches and drawings has been prepared for publication.

When the news spread over England of Mr. Thackeray’s sudden death, it was felt that a personal loss had been sustained by every one who cared for books and for style.  Other men might write themselves out, their invention might become weary; and, indeed, Mr. Thackeray himself felt this fatigue.  He wished he could get some one to do “the business” of his stories he told the world in a “Roundabout Paper.”  The love-making parts of “the business” annoyed him, and made him blush, in the privacy of his study, “as if he were going into an apoplexy.”  Some signs of this distaste for the work of the novelist were obvious, perhaps, in “Philip,” though they did not mar the exquisite tenderness and charm of “Denis Duval.”  However that might be, his inimitable style was as fresh as ever, with its passages of melancholy, its ease, its flexible strength, and unlooked-for cadences.  It was the talk about life, and the tone of that talk, which fell silent when Thackeray died, that we all felt as an irremediable loss.  There is an old story that Pindar had never in his lifetime written an ode in praise of Persephone, the goddess of death and the dead, and that after he had departed from among living men, his shade communicated to the priests a new hymn on the Queen of Hades.  The works of great writers published after their decease have somewhat of the charm of this fabled hymn; they are voices, familiar and unlocked for, out of the silence.  They are even stranger, when they have such a slight and homelike interest as the trifles that fell unheeded from the pen or pencil of one who has done great things in poetry or art.  Mr. Thackeray’s sketches in the “Orphan of Pimlico” are of this quality—­caricatures thrown off to amuse children who are now grown men and women.  They have the mark of the old unmistakable style, humorous and sad, and, as last remains, they are to be welcomed and treasured.

Mr. Thackeray’s skill with the pencil bore very curious relations to his mastery of the other art, in which lay his strength, but to which perhaps he never gave his love.  Everyone has heard how, when a young man, he was anxious to illustrate “Pickwick,” which found more fitting artists in Seymour and H. K. Browne.  Mr. Thackeray seems to have been well aware of the limitations of his own power as a draughtsman.  In one of his “Roundabout Papers” he described the method—­the secret so to say—­of Rubens; and then goes on to lament the impotence of his own hand, the “pitiful niggling,” that cannot reproduce the bold sweep of Ruben’s brush.