MEMORIES OF THACKERAY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1205, 14 August 1911, Page 8

MEMORIES OF THACKERAY.

Beneath the memorial panel to Thackeray in tho little, stone-flagged cloister that leads to the Charterhouse Chapel there was hung, in honour of Thackeray's centenary, a new wreath of bay leaves and carnations, and upstairs in the great chamber a collection of his manuscripts, drawings, and first editions of his noveU was carefully arranged. Tho exhibit was made by the Titmarsh Club, who entertained iho Poor Brothers in the ancient gue-st hall, hi the quiet old tapestried room in this quiet green comer, that keeps still, in tho heart of modern London the greenness and the peace, that the Carthusian monks left there, the faded old paper-covered booklets, tho outspread manuscripts written with monklike precision, and the schoolboy lists and drawings, and the rows of precious !x>oks wero all very grateful and appropriate. There in Thackeray's hand a vigorous scrawly drawing of a stout, slow boy ueins punched by a slim eager lioy was to b<s seen. It was tho great fight in whioh Venable broke Thackeray's nose. The two names appear in a school list in which oddly enough the name of a "C. E. Dickens" also appears. There also was a group in water-colour of Richmond Thackeray, his wife, and a big-eyed, rather council child who became the novelist. A painting of him as an. undergraduate with a very dashing unknown young woman in satin with a guitar, and a pencil sketch of him with a tiny Imperial drawn by himself when an art student, »:re among/ a host of other portraits. From New York came two sketches of himself in a letter as (1) benevolent and (2) black as thunder. The manuscripts were a wonderful coir lection. How thrilling it was to read in the master's handwriting the first line, "Before tho present century was in its teens," and fool the stress and poise of the hand as it began the greatest novel! Then, to see the brain at work revaluing the words, as whero Black Sambo is introduced with "a new, and handsome laee<l waistcoat." and the pen has scored out "handsome laced" and put in "red." Mr. Pierpont Morgan owns the JISS. of "Vanity Fair," and the first voliri'.e of "The Virginians." It was bm M- in London by another American collector for .C2OOO. Mr. Morgan acquired it for .£1001), and it? value' in America is now said to Iμ .C 12.000. One of the little-known Work? by Thackeray was a drawing and (presumably) the letterpress that accompanies it on tho Anti-Oom Law Circular, 1S3!I. The drawing showed a Russian and a Pole in a boat offering abundance of coin and broad to a famishing group ol hnndlnnm wonders, but a soldier and watchmen mo boating lliwn away, point intj to a notice that "fly order of th< landlords un bread is to l>o landed on Ibis ground." Thackeray plainly was no Piotcclionist