The same number contained Thackeray’s first letter, dated at Paris, Hôtel Mirabeau, July 25, 1839, and concluding with a characteristic little address to the editor, in which he speaks of his feelings “in finding good friends and listeners among strangers far, far away--in receiving from beyond seas kind crumbs of comfort for our hungry vanities.” These letters were signed T. T. (Timothy Titcomb), and eight of them in all were published in the “Corsair.” A few appear in Thackeray’s collected works in a volume entitled “The Paris Sketch Book,” and all of them, with a few changes, in “The Student’s Quarter; or Paris Five and Thirty Years since,” published by Hotten after Thackeray’s death. Thackeray humorously alludes to this episode in his early literary struggles in his novel of “Philip,” the hero of which contributes a weekly letter, signed “Philalethes,” to a fashionable New York journal entitled “The Gazette of the Upper Ten Thousand.” “Political treatises,” writes the excellent Dr. Firmin to his son, “are not so much wanted as personal news, regarding the notabilities of London.” This description of the “Mirror” pointed, of course, at Willis’s authorship of the phrase, “The Upper Ten Thousand.” It may be not uninteresting to compare Thackeray’s opinion of Willis with Willis’s impressions of Thackeray. The author of the “Book of Snobs” paid his respects twice, at least, in print to the author of “Pencillings by the Way:” once in a review of “Dashes at Life” in the “Edinburgh” for October, 1845, and again in an article “On an American Traveler,” being the sixth number of “The Proser,” contributed to the nineteenth volume of “Punch” (1850), and occasioned by Willis’s “People I have Met.” In both of these papers he quizzes Willis, though not unkindly. He laughs especially at his fashion in “Ernest Clay,” of representing the aristocratic English dames as all throwing themselves at the head of the conquering young genius who writes for the magazines. “The great characteristic of high society in England, Mr. Willis assures us, is admiration of literary talent. As some captain of free lancers of former days elbowed his way through royal palaces with the eyes of all womankind after him, so in the present time, a man by being a famous _Free Pencil_ may achieve a similar distinction. This truly surprising truth forms the text of almost every one of Mr. Willis’s ‘Dashes’ at English and Continental life.”