INTRODUCTORY NOTE. THACKERAY had published his second great novel, Pendennis, when he bethought himself of lecturing as a means of increasing his income. Not long before, there had come into existence a number of Mechanics Institutes, especially in the midland counties, and these had established lecture courses and made it easy for a lecturer to find an audience. The system, while not so extensive, was somewhat parallel to the Lyceum in the United States, then in a flourishing condition, and it was a union of these Institutes which had made a special inducement to Emerson to go to England to deliver lectures in 1847. Thackeray, like Coleridge and Carlyle, made his début at Willis's Rooms in London, where he delivered his course on The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century. He was at work at this time on Esmond, and his mind was saturated with the literature of the Queen Anne period. It should not be said that he read that literature for the sake of his lectures and his novel. The reverse is the case. Both lectures and novel sprang from a mind which had assimilated all this material as its natural and congenial nourishment. His writings up to this period give constant illustration of the familiarity which he held toward this field of literature and history. A few after-dinner speeches of Thackeray have been preserved from shorthand notes. They will be found in a later volume of this series, and all bear testimony to the essential quality of his style which was only slightly varied, whether he spoke to an audience or wrote for readers. Thus, when he took up a subject which, to most men, would have been bookish in the extreme, he treated it in the same intimate, half-confidential manner with which he was wont to treat human nature in any of its manifestations. "Lamb," asked Coleridge of Elia, "did you ever hear me preach?" "I never heard you do anything else," stuttered Lamb, perhaps escaping at the moment from out of the chapel of one of Coleridge's monologues. Thus might one have answered had he been asked if he ever heard Thackeray talk. His books all impress the reader as if he were overhearing the author. The delivery of his lectures was absolutely unaffected, but the naturalness was not merely a charm, it was in itself an expression of the man. He gave this course and his later one on The Four Georges in America, and Mr. William B. Reed of Philadelphia in his Haud Immemor, a graceful series of light reminiscences of Thackeray, has given in affectionate words the impression which the novelist made upon his hearers. "The lectures were very successful. There are two classes of people in every American microcosm - those who run after celebrities, and those, resolute not to be pleased, who run as it were against them. All were won or conquered by his simple naturalness; and, as I have said, the lectures were a great success. . . . I merely record my recollection of the peculiar voice and cadence; the exquisite manner of reading poetry; the elocution, matchless in its simplicity; his tranquil attitude the only movement of his hands being when he wiped his glasses as he began and turned over the leaves of his manuscript; his |