I sometimes question if a book is truly a friendly book unless I possess it, and yet this in a way would cut off both Thackeray and the friend whom he loved best of all, "dear old Fitz," for I gave away my "Fitzgerald's Letters" to a friend with whom I exchange many friendly books. A man of leisure and literary tastes, and in easy circumstances, Fitzgerald avoided fame as earnestly as most men seek it. Living in a country cottage with a garden, books, pictures and music, he cherished his many lifelong friendships, which he says were more like loves, by writing letters which have a touch of gentle humor and of tender and unaffected charm, as in a letter to Frederick Tennyson: "I have been through three influenzas; but this is no wonder, for I live in a hut with walls as thin as a sixpence, windows that don't shut, a clay soil safe beneath my feet and a thatch perforated by lascivious sparrows over my head. Here I sit, read, smoke and become wise, and am already quite beyond earthly things. I must say to you as Basil Montague once said in perfect charity to his friends: 'You see my dear fellows, I like you very much, but I continue to advance, and you remain where you are, you see, and so I am obliged to leave you behind. It is no fault of mine.' You must begin to read Seneca, whose letters I have been reading, else you will be no companion to a man who despises wealth, death, etc. I wish you were here to smoke a pipe with me. I play of evenings some of Handel's grand choruses which are the bravest music after all."

And again, to William Bodham Donne, when puzzled over his Agamemnon and the line of signal fires from Troy to Mycenæ, he writes, "I am ignorant of geography, modern and ancient, and do not know the points of the Beacons, and Lemprière, the only classic at hand, doesn't help me. Pray turn to the passage and tell me (quotes three lines of Greek) what, where and why. The rest I know or can find in dictionary or map, but for these:

Lemprière
Is no-where:
Liddell and Scott
Don't help me a jot,
When I'm off, Donnegan
Don't help me on again.

So I'm obliged to resort to old Donne again."

A postscript in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton reads—"Only a word, to add that yesterday came Squire Carlyle from you, and a kind long letter from Mr. Lowell; and the first nightingale, who sang in my garden the same song as in Shakespeare's days."

And finally, to Lawrence the portrait painter: "Have we exchanged a word about Thackeray since his death? I am quite surprised to see how I sit moping about him, so little have I seen him the last ten years, and not once for the last five. To be sure I keep reading his 'Newcomes' of nights and now I have got hold of 'Pendennis.' I keep hearing him say so much of it; I really think I shall hear his step coming up the stairs to this lodging, and about to come (singing) into my room as in old Charlotte Street thirty years ago." And ten years later he writes, "A night or two ago I was reading old Thackeray's 'Roundabouts,' and (a sign of a good book) heard him talking to me."

I am sorry that so many people know Fitzgerald only because of the "Rubaiyat." I confess myself to be rather like-minded with

"That certain old person of Ham,
Who grew weary of Omar Khayyam,
Fitzgerald, said he,
Is as right as can be,
But this cult, and these versions,
O, Damn!"

And Thackeray, there is no one book which stands for him, save, perhaps, the dear little old brown volume of letters to the Brookfields. It is here that we learn much of "Pendennis." In one letter he writes, "I am going to kill Mrs. Pendennis presently, and have her ill in this number. Minnie says, 'O Papa, do make her well again! She can have a regular doctor and be almost dead, and there will come a nice homeopathic physician who will make her well again.'" We who truly know and love him find him ever in his own pages as he smiles kindly at us through his spectacles, or we feel the difficulty with which he is keeping his spectacles dry, and we too say, "Dear old Thackeray," as in the lines at the end of the White Squall, where with pages of nonsense, he writes how the Captain

"Beat the storm to laughter
For well he knew his vessel
With that wind would wrestle;
And when a wreck we thought her,
And doomed ourselves to slaughter,
How gaily he fought her,
And through the hubbub brought her,
And when the tempest caught her,
Cried, George some brandy and water.
And when its force expended,
The harmless storm was ended,
And as the sunrise splendid
Came blushing o'er the sea,
I thought, as day was breaking,
My little girls were waking,
And smiling and making
A prayer at home for me."