Thackeray was one of the foundation scholars, and lived in the school, and wore a gown. He was, from all accounts, an average boy, undistinguished by industry or precocious ability. He was very much like many of Dr. Birch’s little friends: a simple honest, and sometimes mischievous lad. Though he was never elected orator or poet, he wrote parodies, and was clever with a pencil, which he used with no little fancy and humour. The margins of books and scraps of paper of all kinds were covered with sketches, most of them caricatures; and it is said to have been a familiar thing to see the artist surrounded by an admiring crowd of his school-fellows, while he developed, with grotesque extravagance and never-failing effect, the outlines of some juvenile hero or some notability of history. The head master of the school was severe, and as Thackeray was very sensitive, it is supposed that his school days were not of the happiest. But he bore the old foundation no ill-will; who, indeed, shall ever do it more honor than he has done? Only a few weeks before his death, Thackeray was present on Founder’s Day. He sat in his usual back seat in the old chapel. He went thence to hear the oration in the governor’s room, and, as he walked up to the orator with his contribution, was received with hearty applause. At the banquet afterward, he sat at the side of his old friend and school-mate John Leech; and Thackeray it was who, on that occasion proposed the toast of “The Charterhouse.” Taking us through the grounds by the way of Wash-house Court, a quadrangle of very old and smoky buildings, which were attached to the original monastery, the janitor conducted us into the cool and quiet cloister which leads into the chapel. Here is the handsome memorial of the Carthusians slain in the wars, and on the walls is a commemorative tablet to Thackeray. Next to Thackeray’s is a similar tablet to the memory of Leech.