Another wanderer about Hampstead's hills and dales was the great Thackeray, who was often accompanied by some of the family of Mr Crowe, a former editor of the _Daily News_, and father to Eyre Crowe, R.A., and Sir Joseph Archer Crowe. These wanderings seem to have suggested a few of the names bestowed by Thackeray on the characters in his novels, such as “Jack Belsize” and “Lord Highgate,” while the title of “Marquess of Steyne” is reminiscent of another Thackerayan haunt—“Dr” Brighton. Hampstead still better knew Dickens, who is mentioned later in these pages. The two writers are often called rivals; yet novels and men were wholly unlike. Each was a peerless genius in his own line, and each adorned any company in which he moved. Yet, while Dickens was the life and soul of every circle, Thackeray—perhaps the only male novelist who could draw a woman absolutely true to life[14]—always struck us as rather silent and self-absorbed, like one who is studying the people around him with a view to their reproduction in as yet unwritten pages. His six feet of height and proportionate breadth, his wealth of grey hair, and the spectacles he was said never to be seen without, made of him a notable figure everywhere. Yet, however outwardly awe-inspiring, he was the kindliest of satirists, the truest of friends, and has been fitly described as “the man who had the heart of a woman.”[15] At the Athenæum Club he was often seen writing by the hour together in some quiet corner, evidently unconscious of his surroundings, at times enjoying a voiceless laugh, or again, perhaps when telling of Colonel Newcome's death, with “a moisture upon his cheek which was not dew.” Another literary friend—we had many—was William Henry Wills, also mentioned later: a kind friend to struggling authors, who did not a little to start Miss Mulock on her career as authoress, and who made her known to us. He once told us a curious story about an old uncle with whom as a lad he used to stay in the days before the invasion of the west country by railways with their tendency to modernisation of out-of-the-way places. This ancient man lived in a large ancestral mansion, and literally “dined in hall” with his entire household. There was a sanded floor—formerly, no doubt, rush-strewn—and the family and their “retainers” sat down together at a very long table to the midday repast, the servants taking their place literally “below the salt,” which was represented by a large bowl filled with that necessary concomitant. In how many other country houses did this mediæval custom last into the first third of the nineteenth century?[16] Mrs Wills—only sister to the Chambers brothers, William and Robert, who, together with our other publisher friend, Charles Knight, did so much to cheapen the cost and in every way to raise the tone of literature—was, in addition to possessing great charm of manner, an admirable amateur actress, and an unrivalled singer of Scottish songs.