his family was strong and imperious. Moreover, the chain which bound him to India was not snapped by the homeward voyage. His guardian was his greatuncle, Peter Moore, who at Hadley Manor lived the life of a country gentleman, and lavishly spent the fortune he had so easily acquired in India. An active politician, Moore devoted many years to the support of the Whig party in the House of Commons, and, though he should have known better, joined in the pitiful attacks made upon Warren Hastings. But speculation was the real business of his life, and so keenly did he pursue it that he died at Abbeville an impoverished exile. His influence was not unimportant, since, as we may suppose, he quickened Thackeray's early impressions of India, while his career was doubtless the first romance in being that the boy had contemplated. At any rate, India is the vague background of more than one of Thackeray's novels, and Mr Jos Sedley, Colonel Newcome, and even Boggley Wollah and the Bundelcund Banking Company, are as near to fact as to fiction.

Like many another Anglo-Indian boy, Thackeray suffered ill-treatment and neglect at his first school, which was hard by Miss Pinkerton's at Chiswick, and which no doubt was kept in the fear of God by Dr Swishtail. But in 1821 his mother returned from India, the wife of Major Carmichael-Smyth, the kindest of stepfathers, and a year later Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse. Here he remained six indolent years, and as the place is woven into the very web of

his novels, this time of idleness was not wasted. No writer has ever been more loyal to his school than was Thackeray to the Charterhouse. It appears as Grey Friars or Slaughter House again and again; the best of his characters neglect the education that was there provided; and even his sympathy for Richard Steele is the keener, because the Christian Hero was once a gown boy at the old school.

But if the Charterhouse was a pleasant memory, the memory had mellowed with time. For Thackeray was not very happy at school, nor was the system of Dr Russell, for a while triumphantly successful, likely to inspire an intelligent or imaginative boy. He learnt no Greek, he tells us, and little Latin. The famous scene in Pendennis, wherein Pendennis cannot construe the Greek play despite the prompting of Timmins, is drawn from life, and there can be no mistaking the Doctor's speech. "Pendennis, sir," said he, "your idleness is incorrigible and your stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school, and to your family, and I have no doubt will prove so in afterlife to your country. . . . Miserable trifler! A boy who construes de and, instead of de but, at sixteen years of age, is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate." The rhodomontade of the Doctor is confirmed by contemporaries. Dean Liddell, who "sat next" to Thackeray at school, has left a sketch of him. "He never at

tempted to learn the lesson," says the Dean, never exerted himself to grapple with the Horace. We spent our time mostly in drawing, with such skill as we could command. His handiwork was very superior to mine, and his taste for comic scenes at that time exhibited itself in burlesque representations of Shakespeare. I remember one—Macbeth as a butcher brandishing two blood-reeking knives, and Lady Macbeth as a butcher's wife clapping him on the shoulder to encourage him." Thus the faculty of drawing declared itself early, as a few experiments remain to prove. But Dean Liddell repudiates the charge that he destroyed Thackeray's "opportunities of self-improvement" by doing his Latin verses.

For the rest, Thackeray, the schoolboy, appears to have been "pretty, gentle, and rather timid," as Venables, the smasher of his nose and his lifelong friend, describes him. He was never flogged, and only inspected the famous flogging-block "as an amateur." He had a taste for "pastry-cookery," and once consumed a half-a-crown's worth, "including ginger-beer." He had a still keener taste for reading, not the Latin and Greek books prescribed by his masters, but The Heart of MidLothian by the author of Waverley, or Life in London by Pierce Egan. In other words, Dumbiedikes meant more to him than the Pious Æneas, and he professed a far deeper sympathy with Tom and Jerry, not forgetting Bob Logic, than with Cæsar crossing the Rubicon, or Hannibal splitting the Alps with vinegar. More than

penny-tarts, more than games, he loved the novels of his boyhood. "I trouble you to find such novels in the present day!" he exclaims when, in his De Juventute, he glances back into the past. "O Scottish Chiefs, didn't we weep over you! O Mysteries of Udolpho, didn't I and Briggs Minor draw pictures out of you!" In fact, his was the childhood proper to a writer of romance, and if his career at school was undistinguished either by vice or virtue, it was by no means fruitless. The young Thackeray was already observant, and not only did he know how to use his eyes, but he could store up his experience. He, too, saw the celebrated fight between Berry and Biggs; he, too, rejoiced that at the 102nd round Biggs, the bully, failed to come up to time; he, too, marvelled at the dignity of the head-boy, whom he confidently believed would be Prime Minister of England, and who, he was surprised to find in afterlife, did not top six feet. Like unnumbered others, he remembered the time when the big boys wore moustaches and smoked cigars, and he cherished the memory-this one unique-of "old Hawkins," the cock of the school, who once thrashed a bargee at Jack Randall's in Slaughter House Lane. In brief, he carried from the Charterhouse the true flavour of the place, and if he left behind him all knowledge of the classics, he was already more apt for literature than the famous head-boy himself.

But he did not love the Charterhouse until he had created it for himself. Not even the presence of such

friends as Liddell, Venables, and John Leech atoned for Russell's savagery. The Doctor's eye was always upon him, whom he denounced for "an idle, shuffling, profligate boy," and in the last letter written from school the boy desires nothing so much as a release from his bondage. "There are but three hundred and seventy in the school," he wrote; "I wish there were only three hundred and sixty-nine." So in 1828 he said. a joyous good-bye to the Doctor, to Biggs and Berry and all the rest, and prepared himself with his stepfather's help to enter the University of Cambridge. Trinity was his college, and William Whewell was his tutor, and while he loved his college, he cherished neither sympathy nor respect for the great man who wrote The Plurality of Worlds. Crump, in The Snob Papers, the Grand Llama who would not permit an undergraduate to sit down in his presence, owes something to that Master of Trinity whom Sir Francis Doyle called "God's greatest work," and whom Thackeray attacked with a violence that was neither humorous nor just. Moreover, his brief sojourn at Cambridge-he stayed but four terms was undistinguished. It has been told a dozen times how he was a bye-term man and took a fourth class in his May, but these details are of no importance it is enough to remember that he belonged to as brilliant a set as has rarely illuminated either university, and that at Trinity he made his first experiments in literature.

The friend of Tennyson, FitzGerald, Monckton