Thackeray from his treasures of wit and sarcasm poured out anecdote after anecdote; he used plenty of vinegar and cayenne pepper, but there was always a flavour of kindliness and good-nature, even in his most cutting remarks. I saw more of him when he came to Oxford to lecture on the Four Georges, and when he stood for Parliament and was defeated by Cardwell and Charles Neate. After one of his lectures, when I expressed my delight with his brilliant success, “Wait, wait,” he said, “the time will come when you will lecture at Oxford.” At that time my English was still very crumbly; there was no idea of my staying on in England, still less of my ever becoming a professor at Oxford. Thackeray’s novels were a great delight to me then, and some have remained so for life. Still, there is a fashion in all things, in literature quite as much as in music, and when lately reading “The Newcomes” I was surprised at the meagreness of the dialogue, the very dialogues for which we felt so impatient from month to month when the book first came out in numbers. Still one always recognises in Thackeray the powerful artist, who, like a Japanese painter, will with a few lines place a living man or woman before you, never to be forgotten. I am sorry I missed seeing and knowing more of Charles Dickens. I met him in my very early days with a friend of mine at some tavern in the Strand, but did not see him again till quite at the end of his career, when he was giving readings from his novels, and knew how to make his audiences either weep or laugh. Still I am glad to have seen him in the flesh, both as a young and as an old man. However wide apart our interests in life might be, no one who had read his novels could look on Dickens as a stranger. He knew the heart of man to the very core, and could draw a picture of human suffering with a more loving hand than any other English writer. He also possessed now and then the grand style, and even in his pictures of still life the hand of the master can always be perceived. He must have shed many a tear over the deathbed of poor Joe; he must have chuckled and shouted over Mr. Winkle and Mr. Tupman going out partridge shooting. Perhaps to our taste, as it now is, some of his characters are too sentimental and simpering, but there are few writers now who could create his child-wife. It always seemed to me very strange that my friend Stanley, though he received Dickens among the great ones of Westminster Abbey, could not, as he confessed to me, take any pleasure in his works.