“Get David Copperfield,” he writes in a familiar letter: “by jingo, it’s beautiful; it beats the yellow chap (Pendennis) of this month hollow.”
And again, “Have you read Dickens? Oh, it’s charming. Bravo Dickens! it (David Copperfield again) has some of his very prettiest touches—those inimitable Dickens’ touches which make such a great man of him.”
In truth there was in this tall fellow of six-feet-four a strain of melancholy not seldom observable in giants.[2] Add to this that touch of inherited Anglo-Indian melancholy of which I spoke a fortnight ago; add the tragedy of his marriage; and I think we need not seek amid any literary disappointments for the well of the song of “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” which, springing evident in the title of his first great novel, runs an undercurrent through all that he wrote.
[2] He was remarkable for height and bulk: a lumbering, unathletic figure with a slouch. One day being at a fair with his friend “Big Higgins” (Jacob Omnium) they approached a booth and Higgins felt in his pockets for small change. “Oh!” said Thackeray, “they’ll pass us in free, as two of the profession.”
It was not for nothing that he translated Uhland’s
The King on the Tower
The cold grey hills they bind me around,
The darksome valleys lie sleeping below,
But the winds as they pass o’er all this ground,
Bring me never a sound of woe!