'Make us some faces,' his school-companions would cry. 'Whom will you have? name your friends,' says the young artist. Perhaps one young rogue, with a schoolboy's taste for personalities, will cry, 'Old Buggins;' and the junior Buggins blushes and fidgets as the ideal presentment of his progenitor is rapidly dashed off and held up to the appreciation of a circle of rapturous critics. 'Now,' says the wounded youngster, glad to retaliate, 'you remember old Figgins' pater when he brought Old Figs back and forgot to tip—draw him!' and a faithful portraiture of that economic civic ornament is produced from recollection.
The gallery of family portraits is doubtless successfully exhausted, and each of the boys who love books, calls for a different favourite of fiction, or the designer exercises his budding fancy in summoning monks, Turks, ogres, bandits, highwaymen, and other heroes, traditional or imaginary, from that wonderful well of his, which, in after years, was to pour out so frankly from its rich reservoirs for the recreation, and improvement too, of an audience more numerous, but perhaps less enthusiastic, than that which surrounded him at Greyfriars.
Virtue triumphant
Early Recreations—Marbles
Holidays came, and with them the chance of visiting the theatres. Think of the plays in fashion between 1820 and '30; what juvenile rejoicings over the moral drama, over the wicked earl unmasked in the last Act, the persecuted maiden triumphant, and virtue's defenders rewarded. Recall the pieces in vogue in those early days, to which the novelist refers with constant pleasure; how does he write of nautical melodramas, of 'Black Ey'd Seusan,' and such simply constructed pieces as he has parodied in the pages of 'Punch:' such as Theodore Hook is described hitting off on the piano after dinner. Think of Sadler's Wells, and the real water, turned on from the New River adjacent. Remember Astley's, and its gallant stud of horses. How faded are all these glories in our time, yet they were gorgeous subjects for young Thackeray's hand to work out; and we can well conceive eager little Cistercians, in miniature black gowns and breeches, revelling over the splendid pictures, perhaps made more glorious with the colour box. How many of these scraps have been treasured to this day, and are now gone with the holders, heaven knows where?
