A Sentry
Sketches of Indian life and Anglo-Indians generally are abundantly interspersed through Mr. Thackeray's writings, but he left India too early to have profited much by Indian experiences. He is said, however, to have retained so strong an impression of the scene of his early childhood, as to have wished in later life to revisit it, and recall such things as were still remembered by him. In his seventh year he was sent to England, and when the ship touched at St. Helena, he was taken up to have a glimpse of Bowood, and there saw that great Captain at whose name the rulers of the earth had so often trembled. It is remarkable that in his little account of the second funeral of Napoleon, which he witnessed in Paris in 1840, no allusion to this fact appears; but he himself has described it in one of his latest works—the lectures on 'The Four Georges,' first delivered in the United States in 1855-56, and afterwards described by the Athenæum as 'an airy, humorous, and brilliant picture of English life and manners, produced by honest reading out of many books, and lighted with the glow of individual sympathy and intellect.'
A highly respectable Member of Society
A Master of Arts
We fancy that Thackeray was placed under the protection of his grandfather, William Makepeace Thackeray, who had settled with a good fortune, the fruit of his industry in India, at Hadley, near Chipping Barnet, a little village, in the churchyard of which lies buried the once-read Mrs. Chapone, the authoress of the 'Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,' the correspondent of Richardson, and the intimate friend of the learned Mrs. Carter and other blue-stocking ladies of that time.
A Man of Letters