“No one can be surer than I of the greatness and goodness of his heart.” The first period of his life as a man of letters was given almost entirely to satirical and fragmentary writing, under various _noms de guerre_. Hence, he remained for a long time in comparative poverty and obscurity, from which he stepped into fame and prosperity with the publication of his first large novel, _Vanity Fair_, in 1847-48. It was like turning the corner of Grub Street and coming into Glory Avenue. Henceforth the way was open, though not easy. The succession of his big, welcome novels was slow, steady, unbroken. Each one brought him thousands of new readers, and the old ones were _semper fideles_, even when they professed a preference for the earlier over the later volumes. His lecture tours in Great Britain and the United States were eminently successful—more so, I think, than those of Charles Dickens. They may have brought in less money, but more of what old William Caxton, the prince of printers, called “good fame and renommee.” The last of his completed books, and one of his most delightful, was _Roundabout Papers_—a volume of essays that has no superior in English for a light, firm, friendly touch upon the realities of life. His last story begun was _Denis Duval_, and on this he was working when he laid down his pen on Christmas Eve, 1863, and fell asleep for the last time. It was Edmund Yates who wrote of him then: “Thackeray was dead; and the purest English prose writer of the nineteenth century and the novelist with a greater knowledge of the human heart, as it really is, than any other—with the exception perhaps of Shakespeare and Balzac—was suddenly struck down in the midst of us.” _The human heart as it really is_—there’s the point! That is what Thackeray sought to know, to understand, to reveal, and—no! not to explain, nor to judge and sentence—for that, as he well knew, was far beyond him or any of us—but his desire was to _show_ the real heart of man, in its various complexities and perplexities, working its way through the divers realities and unrealities in which we are all entangled. The acute French critic, Edmond Scherer, distinguished and divided between George Eliot as “a novelist of character,” and Thackeray as “a novelist of manners.” The epithet will pass only if we take the word in the sense of William of Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth man.” For, as surely as there is something in the outward demeanour which unveils and discloses the person within, even so surely is there something in behaviour, the habitual mode of speech and conduct, which moulds the man using it. A false behaviour weaves a texture of lies into the warp of his nature. A true behaviour weakens the hold of his own self-delusions, and so helps him to know what he really is—which is good for him and for others.