It was not, however, destined that she and her child should inhabit that little garret.  We were to leave our lodgings on Monday morning; but on Saturday evening the child was seized with convulsions, and all Sunday the mother watched and prayed for it:  but it pleased God to take the innocent infant from us, and on Sunday, at midnight, it lay a corpse in its mother’s bosom.  Amen.  We have other children, happy and well, now round about us, and from the father’s heart the memory of this little thing has almost faded; but I do believe that every day of her life the mother thinks of her first-born that was with her for so short a while:  many and many a time she has taken her daughters to the grave, in Saint Bride’s, where he lies buried; and she wears still at her neck a little, little lock of gold hair, which she took from the head of the infant as he lay smiling in his coffin.  It has happened to me to forget the child’s birthday, but to her never; and often in the midst of common talk, comes something that shows she is thinking of the child still,—­some simple allusion that is to me inexpressibly affecting.

Could words simpler, purer, more touching be found to paint a terrible, albeit very common sorrow!  Not a needless epithet, not a false note, not a touch over-wrought!  And this is the writing of an unknown, untried youth!

This exquisitely simple, easy, idiomatic, and nervous style marks all Thackeray’s work for his twenty-six years of activity, and is equally perfect for whatever purpose it is used, and in whatever key he may choose to compose.  It naturally culminates in Vanity Fair, written just in the middle of his literary career.  Here not a word is wasted:  the profoundest impressions are made by a quiet sentence or a dozen plain words that neither Swift nor Defoe could have surpassed.  I know nothing in English literature more powerful than those last lines of the thirty-second chapter of Vanity Fair.  For thirty-two chapters we have been following the loves, sorrows, and anxieties of Amelia Sedley and George Osborne.  For four chapters the story has pictured the scene in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo.  The women and non-combatants are trembling with excitement, anxiety, fear; the men are in the field, whilst the cannon roar all day in the distance—­Amelia half distracted with love, jealousy, and foreboding.  And the wild alternations of hope, terror, grief, and agony are suddenly closed in the last paragraph of Chapter XXXII.

No more firing was heard at Brussels—­the pursuit rolled miles away.  Darkness came down on the field and city:  and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

Take all the great critical scenes in the book, and note how simple, and yet how full of pathos and of power, is the language in which they are described.  There is the last parting of George and Amelia as the bugle rings to arms.