14. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (+1811-1863+), one of the most original of English novelists, was born at Calcutta in the year 1811. The son of a gentleman high in the civil service of the East India Company, he was sent to England to be educated, and was some years at Charterhouse School, where one of his schoolfellows was Alfred Tennyson. He then went on to the University of Cambridge, which he left without taking a degree. Painting was the profession that he at first chose; and he studied art both in France and Germany. At the age of twenty-nine, however, he discovered that he was on a false tack, gave up painting, and took to literary work as his true field. He contributed many pleasant articles to ‘Fraser’s Magazine,’ under the name of +Michael Angelo Titmarsh+; and one of his most beautiful and most pathetic stories, +The Great Hoggarty Diamond+, was also written under this name. He did not, however, take his true place as an English novelist of the first rank until the year 1847, when he published his first serial novel, +Vanity Fair+. Readers now began everywhere to class him with Charles Dickens, and even above him. His most beautiful work is perhaps +The Newcomes+; but the work which exhibits most fully the wonderful power of his art and his intimate knowledge of the spirit and the details of our older English life is +The History of Henry Esmond+-- a work written in the style and language of the days of Queen Anne, and as beautiful as anything ever done by Addison himself. He died in the year 1863.