And when it has feasted the master,
’Twill amply suffice for the maid:
Meanwhile I will smoke my canaster,
And tipple my ale in the shade.
Years ago, I discoursed, standing here, on the Horatian Model in English Verse, attempting to show you how this man and that man—Andrew Marvell, for example, and Matthew Prior, had attempted it here and there and how nearly achieved it: of Milton, again, how he tried to build his Sonnet, redeeming it from the Petrarcan love-business upon the model of the Horatian Ode; how some sonnets of his (familiar or political—that To Mr. Lawrence for instance, as a specimen in one mode, or those To the Lady Margaret Ley, or On the Late Massacre in Piedmont as specimens in another) are deliberately, experimentally Horatian; and how narrowly—how very narrowly—William Cowper, by deflection of religious mania, missed to be our purest Horace of all. But Thackeray is of the band. To alter a word of Carlyle’s, “a beautiful vein of Horace lay struggling about him.”
IV
But, to return upon the first of the two “key-secrets”—Disappointment and Religion—and to leave Religion aside for a moment—I cannot find that, save in his domestic affliction, Thackeray can rightly be called a disappointed man. There is of course a sense—there is of course a degree—in which every one of us, if he be worth anything, arrives at being a disappointed man. We all have our knocks to bear, and some the most dreadful irremediable wounds to bind up and hide. But whatever Thackeray spent or owed at Cambridge (to pay in due time), he took away, with his experience, a most gallant heart. He went to London, lost the rest of his money in journalistic adventures, and fared out as a random writer, without (as they say) a penny to put between himself and heaven. What does he write later on in reminiscence to his mother, but that these days of struggle were the jolliest of all his life?—
Ye joys that Time hath swept with him away,
Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;
For you I pawned my watch full many a day,