Meanwhile the elder Thackeray died, and the future historian of Vanity Fair, launched himself into its midst with an annual income of about a thousand pounds. He lived according to his whims, drew sharp and clever caricatures, smoked, lounged, feasted upon books of every kind, and opened the oyster of the world at leisure. His mother, a woman of great beauty, and full of talent and tenderness, whose memory is so filially embalmed in the character of the mother of Arthur Pendennis, married again, about this time, and the young man, always the object of the proudest maternal love, came into possession of his paternal inheritance. He immediately returned from the continent where he had been staying a little time, and took up his residence in the Temple. Nascent Jurists and Budding Barristers at Law, who have completed a full course at Cambridge or Oxford, enjoy the privilege of paying high prices for comfortable quarters in the Temple, and of eating splendid dinners in its ancient dining-room. Here Thackeray entered himself as a student of jurisprudence, and in the character of Warrington in “Pendennis,” he has developed the career of the students, and the varied life of the Temple, in some of the best passages he has ever written. Henry Taylor, the dramatist, author of Philip Van Artevelde, is among the residents of the Temple, and is mentioned by the German Commentator as the original of a character in Thackeray’s romance. We are at a loss to determine which, for if Warrington be so intended, he seems to us to lose the point. Warrington is a man of power without a career—Taylor, a man of talent, who has certainly achieved a reputation quite equal to his just claims. However, the Temple not only furnished our author characters, but also the necessity of drawing them; for while there, and when scarcely more than 23 years old, the young man had “fooled away” his property, and was poor. The days of smoking, lounging, and “loafing” were evidently ending, and he betook himself to Paris, conceiving, from his facility in sketching, that he was born for an artist. A brief time among the Parisian ateliers sufficed to remove this idea. But as his step-father at this period established a journal in London, called “The Constitutional,” the artist naturally became its Paris correspondent. Thus, like Dickens, he commenced his literary career as a journalist. In Paris, Thackeray met his present wife, an Irish lady of good family, and married her.