Yet I have seen him quite dethroned by a pure man of the world. His face degenerated into a puzzled state. I go so far as to believe that all great men have felt the importance of the outward and visible impression they should produce. Socrates was as wise as Plato, indeed he was Plato’s master, but Plato dressed better, and has the greater name. Pericles was the first gentleman of Greece,--not the George IV. though, exactly. Remember Cæsar’s laurel-wig. “I might multiply instances, but I wish to have room to say how much I have been pleased with Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair.’ He has not Dickens’s talents as a caricaturist, but he draws with more truth. Dickens can take a character to pieces and make us laugh immoderately at the comic parts of it--or he takes only the comic part, as boys take the honey-bag of the bee, destroying the whole insect to get at it. But Thackeray can put a character together. He has more constructive power. D. is a satirizer, T. a satirist. I don’t think D. ever made anything equal to Becky Sharp. Rawdon Crawley, too, is admirable; so in truth are all the characters in their way, except Amelia, who is nothing in particular. “I liked ‘Wuthering Heights,’ too, as you did, though not so much. There is great power in it, but it is like looking at nature through a crooked pane of glass. Some English journalist has nicknamed the author Salvator Rosa, and our journalists of course all repeat it. But it is nonsense. For it is not wildness and rudeness that the author is remarkable for, but delicacy. A character may be distorted without being wild or rude. Unnatural causes may crook a violet as well as an oak. Rochester is a truly refined character, and his roughness and coarseness are only the shields (scabs, as it were) over his finer nature. My sheet ends our conversation.” There is a picture of the Lowells at home at this time, drawn by Miss Fredrika Bremer. Lowell had reviewed her writings in their English dress--it was his first contribution to the _North American_,--and on her coming to America a meeting occurred, which resulted in a friendly visit paid by Miss Bremer to Elmwood. The form in which she recorded her impressions of travel was in letters home, afterward gathered into a book. It was on 15 December, 1849, that she wrote:--