and it was mangled by editorial necessities. And yet it can still be
read and re-read as one of Thackeray's masterpieces, trifling and
curtailed as it is (for it may be printed in one hundred pages); it is
as full of wit, humour, scathing insight, and fine pathos in the midst
of burlesque, as is _Vanity Fair_ itself. It is already Thackeray in
all his strength, with his "Snobs," his "Nobs," his fierce satire, and
his exquisite style.
Modern romance has no purer, more pathetic, or simpler page than the
tale of the death of poor Samuel Titmarsh's first child. Though it is,
as it deserves to be, a household word, the passage must be quoted here
as a specimen of faultless and beautiful style.
It was not, however, destined that she and her child should inhabit
that little garret. We were to leave our lodgings on Monday morning;
but on Saturday evening the child was seized with convulsions, and all
Sunday the mother watched and prayed for it: but it pleased God to take
the innocent infant from us, and on Sunday, at midnight, it lay a
corpse in its mother's bosom. Amen. We have other children, happy and
well, now round about us, and from the father's heart the memory of
this little thing has almost faded; but I do believe that every day of
her life the mother thinks of her first-born that was with her for so
short a while: many and many a time she has taken her daughters to the
grave, in Saint Bride's, where he lies buried; and she wears still at
her neck a little, little lock of gold hair, which she took from the
head of the infant as he lay smiling in his coffin. It has happened to
me to forget the child's birthday, but to her never; and often in the
midst of common talk, comes something that shows she is thinking of the
child still,--some simple allusion that is to me inexpressibly
affecting.
Could words simpler, purer, more touching be found to paint a terrible,
albeit very common sorrow! Not a needless epithet, not a false note,
not a touch over-wrought! And this is the writing of an unknown,
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