THACKERAY.

CHAPTER I.

BIOGRAPHICAL.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY was born at Calcutta on July 18, 1811. His family, sprung from yeomen of Yorkshire, was distinguished throughout the eighteenth century in the learned professions, as well as in the civil and military services of India. Thackerays not a few had lived and died in the making of our Eastern Empire. They had done those deeds of simple heroism which benefit a people, and bring their authors but little fame. They had built roads, they had administered justice, and more than one had fallen on the battlefield. Eminent amongst them was Richmond Thackeray, Collector at Alipur, who in 1810 married Anne Becher, herself the daughter of a family famous in Bengal. Five years later the Collector died, leaving a widow and one son, William Makepeace, just four years old,

A

who grew up to be the author of Vanity Fair. Like Clive Newcome, William Makepeace left India a child of six, and when he pictured the Colonel "tottering up the steps of the ghaut," he pictured his own experience. "I wrote this," he confessed, "remembering in long, long distant days such a ghaut, or river-stair at Calcutta; and a day when down those steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two children, whose mothers remained on shore. We were first

cousins; had been little playmates and friends from the time of our birth; and the first house in London to which I was taken was that of our aunt." The little playmate was his cousin, Richmond Shakespear, whose death, deplored in a Roundabout Paper, took place two years before his own. In those days a visit to the enchained Emperor was a proper incident of travel, and a vision of the Corsican ogre was one of Thackeray's earliest and most vivid impressions. "Our ship touched at an island on the way home," he wrote, "where my black servant took me a long walk over rocks and hills until we reached a garden, where we saw a man walking. That's he,' said the black man: 'that is Bonaparte! He eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands upon.'

He arrived in England when "she was in mourning for the young Princess Charlotte, the hope of the Empire." Nor did he look again upon his native East. But its influence never left him. If his childish memory was vague and tear-bedimmed, the tradition of