Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Thackeray as a Reader and Critic of Books SCARCELY a month passes without an article on Thackeray in some magazine or review. Reminiscences of Thackeray, Thackeray's Homes and Haunts, Thackeray's Originals, Thackeray in the United States, Thackeray as an Orator, Thackeray and Dickens, Thackeray as a Writer, Thackeray as Artist, Thackeray as Art-Critic, Thackeray and the Stage, Thackeray and Punch, are among recent headings. It is strange, therefore, when it might be assumed that this author had been treated from every standpoint, to find that no one has thought it worth while to discourse of him as a reader and critic of books. As a boy Thackeray was fond of books, and at Cambridge he was an omnivorous reader, principally, however, of fiction, poetry, and history. History, indeed, was one ofhis favourite studies. "Read a tremendous lot of history," he advised a young cousin one day as they were leaving the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he had been searching for a book that would tell him, not of the battles of Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, but, figuratively speaking, of the colour of his breeches. Though in later years, speaking of this branch of learning, he remarked to Mr. Jeffreson: "There's nothing new, and there 's nothing true, and it don't much signify," yet as a young man he was a stickler for the dignity of history. Reviewing "The Duchess of Marlborough's Private Correspondence" in the Times (1838) he expressed his disappointment that "the dignity of history sadly diminishes as we grow better acquainted with the materials which compose it. In our orthodox history books, the characters move on as in a gaudy play-house procession, a glittering pageant of kings and warriors and stately ladies majestically appearing and passing away. Only he who s...