The young man who makes the attempt knows that he must run the chance. He is well aware that nine must fail where one will make his running good. So much as that does reach his ears, and recommends itself to his common sense. But why should it not be he as well as another? There is always some lucky one winning the prize. And this prize when it has been won is so well worth the winning! He can endure starvation,--so he tells himself,--as well as another. He will try. But yet he knows that he has but one chance out of ten in his favour, and it is only in his happier moments that he flatters himself that that remains to him. Then there falls upon him,--in the midst of that labour which for its success especially requires that a man's heart shall be light, and that he be always at his best,--doubt and despair. If there be no chance, of what use is his labour? Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, and amuse himself after that fashion? Thus the very industry which alone could give him a chance is discarded. It is so that the young man feels who, with some slight belief in himself and with many doubts, sits down to commence the literary labour by which he hopes to live. So it was, no doubt, with Thackeray. Such were his hopes and his fears;--with a resolution of which we can well understand that it should have waned at times, of earning his bread, if he did not make his fortune, in the world of literature. One has not to look far for evidence of the condition I have described,--that it was so, Amaryllis and all. How or when he made his very first attempt in London, I have not learned; but he had not probably spent his money without forming "press" acquaintances, and had thus found an aperture for the thin end of the wedge. He wrote for _The Constitutional_, of which he was part proprietor, beginning his work for that paper as a correspondent from Paris. For a while he was connected with _The Times_ newspaper, though his work there did not I think amount to much. His first regular employment was on _Fraser's Magazine_, when Mr. Fraser's shop was in Regent Street, when Oliver Yorke was the presumed editor, and among contributors, Carlyle was one of the most notable. I imagine that the battle of life was difficult enough with him even after he had become one of the leading props of that magazine. All that he wrote was not taken, and all that was taken was not approved. In 1837-38, the _History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond_ appeared in the magazine. The _Great Hoggarty Diamond_ is now known to all readers of Thackeray's works. It is not my purpose to speak specially of it here, except to assert that it has been thought to be a great success. When it was being brought out, the author told a friend of his,--and of mine,--that it was not much thought of at Fraser's, and that he had been called upon to shorten it. That is an incident disagreeable in its