One at least of these evenings is well remembered. Its distinguishing feature was my being tipped. My mother and I had gone on this occasion quite early to our places--half an hour or three-quarters before the time when the lecture should begin--and we found the lecturer already at his post. He, with head thrown back, had been walking with long strides up and down the little waiting-room, and talking in bright spirits to my mother, when a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and diving into one of his pockets he brought out a sovereign--perhaps it was a five-dollar gold piece--and insisted upon giving it to me; but the proposal produced at once a most severe parental resistance, while I disinterestedly looked on--a resistance apparently quite unlooked for by "my illustrious friend," who had much trouble in explaining that this species of beneficence was a thing of course in England. But American pride was silenced at last, though not convinced, as will be seen, for it planned on the spot a compromise which should reconcile the differences of national feeling, though _I_ was induced to suppose that the sovereign was as far out of my reach as ever; and being then, as I said before, above or below such things, I turned all my attention to the lecture, which began soon afterward, and whose subject, the royal bugbear of patriotic schoolboys of that time, I imagined I knew all about. It was therefore with astonished awe that I heard the peroration, when the speaker said, appealing directly to us all: "O brothers speaking the same dear mother-tongue! O comrades! enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together as we stand by this royal corpse and call a truce to battle! Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than the poorest--dead whom millions prayed for in vain. Driven off his throne, buffeted by rude hands, with his children in revolt, the darling of his old age killed before him untimely--our Lear hangs over her breathless lips and cries, Cordelia! Cordelia! stay a little! Vex not his ghost: oh, let him pass! He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. Hush, strife and quarrel, over the solemn grave! Sound, trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, dark curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy." This view of the subject was altogether new. The compromise just spoken of--and I must bring to an end my story, already too long--consisted in the expenditure of the five-dollar piece in two of the books written by the bestower of that inflammatory coin. I open the volumes of _Pendennis_ and _Vanity Fair_ which have been lying at my elbow, and across the title-page of each I see written, in curiously small and delicate hand, "---- ----, with W. M. Thackeray's kind regards. April, 1856." These were the books. H. R. HAMLET IN A FRENCH DRESS.