"His persistent state, especially for the later half of his life, was profoundly _morne_, there is no other word for it. This arose in part from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness of mankind . . . This feeling, acting on a harsh and savage nature, ended in the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift; acting on the kindly and sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, it led only to compassionate sadness." A great part of his life, and most of his happiness, lay in love. "Ich habe auch viel geliebt," he says, and it is a hazardous kind of happiness that attends great affection. Your capital is always at the mercy of failures, of death, of jealousy, of estrangement. But he had so much love to give that he could not but trust those perilous investments. Other troubles he had that may have been diversions from those. He did not always keep that manly common sense in regard to criticism, which he shows in a letter to Mrs. Brookfield. "Did you read the _Spectator's_ sarcastic notice of 'Vanity Fair'? I don't think it is just, but think Kintoul (Rintoul?) is a very honest man, and rather inclined to deal severely with his private friends lest he should fall into the other extreme: to be sure he keeps out of it, I mean the other extreme, very well." That is the way to take unfavourable criticisms--not to go declaring that a man is your enemy because he does not like your book, your ballads, your idyls, your sermons, what you please. Why cannot people keep literature and liking apart? Am I bound to think Jones a bad citizen, a bad man, a bad householder, because his poetry leaves me cold? Need he regard me as a malevolent green-eyed monster, because I don't want to read him? Thackeray was not always true in his later years to these excellent principles. He was troubled about trifles of criticisms and gossip, _bagatelles_ not worth noticing, still less worth remembering and recording. Do not let us record them, then.