I know nothing of his origin, except the fact of his being an Englishman, or what his first calling had been; but he had evolved among us from a house-painter to an organ-builder, and he had a passionate love of music.  He built his organs from the ground up, and made every part of them with his own hands; I believe they were very good, and at any rate the churches in the country about took them from him as fast as he could make them.  He had one in his own house, and it was fine to see him as he sat before it, with his long, tremulous hands outstretched to the keys, his noble head thrown back and his sensitive face lifted in the rapture of his music.  He was a rarely intelligent creature, and an artist in every fibre; and if you did not quarrel with his manifold perversities, he was a delightful companion.

After my friend went away I fell much to him for society, and we took long, rambling walks together, or sat on the stoop before his door, or lounged over the books in the drug-store, and talked evermore of literature.  He must have been nearly three times my age, but that did not matter; we met in the equality of the ideal world where there is neither old nor young, any more than there is rich or poor.  He had read a great deal, but of all he had read he liked Dickens best, and was always coming back to him with affection, whenever the talk strayed.  He could not make me out when I criticised the style of Dickens; and when I praised Thackeray’s style to the disadvantage of Dickens’s he could only accuse me of a sort of aesthetic snobbishness in my preference.  Dickens, he said, was for the million, and Thackeray was for the upper ten thousand.  His view amused me at the time, and yet I am not sure that it was altogether mistaken.

There is certainly a property in Thackeray that somehow flatters the reader into the belief that he is better than other people.  I do not mean to say that this was why I thought him a finer writer than Dickens, but I will own that it was probably one of the reasons why I liked him better; if I appreciated him so fully as I felt, I must be of a finer porcelain than the earthen pots which were not aware of any particular difference in the various liquors poured into them.  In Dickens the virtue of his social defect is that he never appeals to the principle which sniffs, in his reader.  The base of his work is the whole breadth and depth of humanity itself.  It is helplessly elemental, but it is not the less grandly so, and if it deals with the simpler manifestations of character, character affected by the interests and passions rather than the tastes and preferences, it certainly deals with the larger moods through them.  I do not know that in the whole range of his work he once suffers us to feel our superiority to a fellow-creature through any social accident, or except for some moral cause.  This makes him very fit reading for a boy, and I should say that a boy could get only good from him.  His view of the world and of society, though it was very little philosophized, was instinctively sane and reasonable, even when it was most impossible.