comes" of the retreat that Thomas Sutton provided for poor gentlemen is known to all of us, and admired and loved. It was there that the preux chevalier Colonel

Drawn by Frederick Gardner

CAPTAIN COSTIGAN

The

Newcome sought refuge from the terrible Campaigner, and there that he said "Adsum" when his name was called. Charterhouse has changed in many respects since Thackeray visited it on Founder's Day, 1863, a fortnight before he died. The school, to which his daughters presented his bed as a souvenir, has been removed to Godalming; but Thomas Sutton's hospital stands to this day with its ancient buildings and its fine quadrangle but little disturbed. It is still a place of great peace, where a man who has done his life's work may well be content to await the summons to another and a better world with such patience and resignation as was shown by Colonel Newcome.

For three years after leaving the Charterhouse, Thackeray was absent from London, first studying at his stepfather's house

in Devonshire, then going to Cambridge University, and afterward staying at Weimar. When he returned to the metropolis in the autumn of 1831, it was to prepare for the bar. He read with the conveyancer Taprell, who occupied the ground floor of No. 1 Hare Court, Temple, and he had chambers, either then or subsequently, at No. 2 Brick Court, close by, where Oliver Goldsmith had lived. "I have been many a time in the chambers in the Temple which were Goldsmith's, and passed up the staircase which Johnson and Burke and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind Goldsmith," he said, in one of his lectures on the English humorists, "the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous of all men was dead within the black oak door." Subsequently he removed to chambers at No. 10 Crown Office Row, in the block of buildings where Charles Lamb was born. The quaint old Temple, with its traditions, always made a strong appeal to the romance that was within him. "The man of letters," he wrote, "can't but love the place which has been inhabited by so many of his brethren, or peopled by their creations, as real to us at this day as the authors whose children they were and Sir Roger de Coverley walking in Temple Garden, and discoursing with

Mr. Spectator about the beauties in hoops and patches who are sauntering over the grass, is just as real a figure to me as old Samuel Johnson, rolling through the fog with the Scotch gentleman at his heels, on their way to Mr. Goldsmith's chambers in Brick Court; or Harry Fielding, with inked ruffles and a wet towel round his head, dashing off articles at midnight for the 'Covent Garden Journal,' while the printer's boy is asleep in the passage."

Thackeray added

in

to the literary associations of the Temple, for he peopled it with his characters. Therein Pendennis shared chambers with George Warrington Lamb Court, and Timmins, who gave the "Little Dinner" his creator has so graphically described, went every day to Fig Tree Court; while Pump Court housed the Hon. Algernon

Percy Deuceace and Mr. Richard Blewitt, who were barristers officially, but who lived on their wits in preference to pursuing their profession. It was the prototypes of these last two gentlemen who in

was kept by Mrs. Bolton and her pretty daughter Fanny. Captain Costigan and Mr. Bows lived on the third floor of No. 4, and to them once came Lady Mirabel, the daughter of the captain, and professionally known as Emily Fotheringay, the beloved of Arthur Pendennis in his nonage. Next door, for a while, resided Colonel Altamont and Captain the Chevalier Edward Strong. It was there that Mrs. Bonner recognized Altamont as the ex

convict Amory, and Blanche Amory, of "Mes Larmes" fame, met her father for the first time for many years.

It is some little way from Clement's Inn to Furnival's Inn, which place is historic as having witnessed the first meeting of Dickens and Thackeray. Dickens at the time was writing "Pickwick," and he wanted in great haste an artist to take the place of Buss, the successor of Robert Seymour, as illustrator of the novel. Thackeray, who had been studying art at Paris, called upon Dickens with two or three drawings, which did not impress the author, and so he retired, dejected. Ever after, Thackeray humorously persisted in referring to the rejection of his offer as "Mr. Pickwick's lucky escape." Not far from Furnival's Inn was Newgate Prison, where Thackeray, who had desired (and failed) to be present at the execution at Paris of Fieschi and Lacénaire, went, in 1840, with Richard Monckton Milnes to see the hanging of Courvoisier, the murderer of Lord William Russell. The scene made a deep impression on him. "I confess, for my part," he wrote, "to that common cant and sickly sentimentality, which, thank God! is felt by a great num

veigled Thackeray as a young man into card-playing, and eased him, then a most gullible pigeon, of fifteen hundred pounds. Once, at Spa, Thackeray pointed out a man to Sir Theodore Martin. "That," he said, "was the original of my Deuceace. I have not seen him since the day he drove me down in his cabriolet to my brokers in the City, where I sold out my patrimony, and handed it over to him. Poor devil!" he added, "my money does not seem to have thriven with him!"

Thackeray was not content to annex only the Temple, but he spread his net wide and captured Shepherd's Inn, which may have been Clement's Inn. There the gate

ber of people nowadays, and which leads them to revolt against murder, whether performed by a ruffian's knife or a hangman's rope; whether accompanied by a curse from the thief as he blows his victim's brains out, or a prayer from my lord on the bench in his wig and black cap." Later, he expressed the opinion that he was wrong, and declared that his feelings were overwrought at the time of writing. "These murderers," he said, "are such devils, after all." But when invited to attend another hanging, "Seeing one man hanged is quite enough in the course of a life," he replied. J'y ai été, as the Frenchman said of hunting."

66

Though, after he abandoned the law, Thackeray came to London to edit the "National Standard," he did not again settle in the metropolis until the spring of 1837, when he was summoned to take command of his stepfather's newspaper venture, "The Constitutional," which occupied most of his time until July 1, when it ceased to appear. Thackeray was now married, and he and his wife, after a brief stay with Major and Mrs. Carmichael Smyth at No. 18 Albion Street, Hyde Park, took a house in the old-fashioned quarter of Bloomsbury, No. 13 Great Coram Street, in which resided their friends John Leech and John (afterward Archdeacon) Allen, the prototype of Dobbin. Bloomsbury figures largely in Thackeray's writings. In Great Coram Street. lived Mr. Todd, the junior partner in the firm of Osborne & Todd: old Osborne lived a few minutes away in the more expensive Russell Square, close by his dear friend Sedley, the father of Jos and Emmy, with whom he remained on the best of terms until Sedley became bankrupt. Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Hoggarty lived in Lamb's Conduit Street, which abuts upon the forecourt of the Foundling Hospital, where Osborne erected a monument to his unforgiven son: "Sacred to the memory of George Osborne, Junior, Esq., late a Captain in His Majesty's -th regiment of foot, who fell on the 18th of June, 1815, aged 28 years, while fighting for his king and country in the glorious victory of Waterloo. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." The list might be greatly extended, but farewell must be taken of Bloomsbury after the bare mention that not far away was the British

Museum, where Thackeray often worked. There, in 1858, Motley found him writing the ninth number of "The Virginians." "He took off his spectacles to see who I was, then immediately invited me to dinner the next day (as he seems always to do, every one he meets), which invitation I could not accept," the historian has recorded; "and he then showed me the page he had been writing, a small, delicate, legible manuscript. After that, we continued our studies."

When Thackeray's home was broken up by his wife's illness, he became, until his children were old enough to live with him, a man about town, and, to some extent, a Bohemian. He belonged to the Garrick and Reform clubs, and later was elected to the Athenæum, and he used and delighted in them all. In his earlier years especially he loved the Garrick, and it was there he made the acquaintance of Andrew Arcedeckne, a gentleman who unconsciously sat for Foker in "Pendennis." The portrait is like to have been lifelike, but Arcedeckne naturally was not pleased, and he waited patiently for a chance to score off Thackeray. After the first lecture on "The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century," when Foker, who had been present, found Thackeray in the smoking-room of the club, receiving congratulations from a group of friends and acquaintances," "Brayvo! Thack, me

boy!" he cried enthusiastically. "Uncommon good show! . . . But it 'll never go without a pianner!"

The Reform Club has made its contribution to "The Book of Snobs" and "Mr. Brown's Letters to a Young Man about Town," and on the wall of the Strangers' Room hangs in the place of honor Laurence's well-known portrait of the novelist. Looking at the menu in the coffee-room of the Reform one day, Thackeray noticed that among the dishes for dinner was "beans and bacon," which he dearly. loved. He was engaged to dine with a distinguished person that evening, but he could not resist "beans and bacon." After a struggle between duty and inclination, which ended as most such struggles do, he sat down and wrote to his host that he deeply regretted having to break his engagement, but he had just met an old friend whom he had not seen for years, and he must beg to be excused.

Another story may be given as a companion to this. More than once the novelist was seen going east at an hour of the day when all the world was moving westward for dinner, and a friend of his, whose curi

Coffee House, with all possible secrecy short of disguise, whenever I thought a good dinner and a bottle by myself would do me good."

All these clubs are still in existence, and it is perhaps more interesting to dwell on the haunts, since demolished, which Thackeray frequented in the days when he was living en garçon, first in Jermyn. Street, and then at No. 88 St. James's Street, opposite St. James's Palace. In

some respects Thackeray's tastes were simple, and he found pleasure in the fare provided by such places, forerunners of the music-halls of to-day, as the "Cyder Cellars," the "Coal Hole," and "Evans's late Joy's," as the punning inscription on the lamp ran. The "Coal Hole," off the Strand, on the site now occupied by Terry's Theater, was the least popular of these; but the "Cyder Cellars," not far away in Maiden Lane, next to the stage-door of the Adelphi Theater, was a rendezvous for the contributors to "Fraser's Magazine." There Ross, the comedian, sang his famous song, "Sam Hall," the chant of a blasphemous chimneysweep, who was to be hanged for murder the next morning. The "Cyder Cellars" was the original of the "Back Kitchen," where George Warrington took Arthur Pendennis, and introduced him to the habitués. There is in "Pendennis" a graphic description of the company frequenting the "Cyder Cellars."

osity was aroused, "stalked" him one evening, and found that he made his way to the Gray's Inn Coffee House, where he dined in solitary state. Cordy Jeaffreson was the man who followed him, and years after he made his confession. "Ah! that was when I was drinking the last of that wonderful bin of port," Thackeray laughed and explained. "It was rare wine. There were only two dozen bottles when I came upon the remains of that bin, and I forthwith bargained with mine host to keep them for me. I drank every bottle and every drop myself. I shared never a bottle with living man; and so long as the wine lasted, I slipped off to the Gray's Inn

Healthy country tradesmen and farmers, in London for their business, came and recreated themselves with the jolly singing and suppers of the Back Kitchen,-squads of young apprentices and assistants, the shutters being closed over the scenes of their labours, came hither, for fresh air doubtless,-rakish young medical students, gallant, dashing, what is called "loudly" dressed,