Horae Subsecivae Author:John Brown 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: THACKERAY'S DEATH great writer — our greatest novelist since A Scott (and in some senses greater, because deeper, more to the quick, more naked than he), our ... more »foremost wit and man of letters since Macaulay — has been taken from us with an awful unexpectedness. He was found dead in bed on the morning of 24th December 1863. This is to us Bo great a personal as well as public calamity, that we feel little able to order our words aright or to see through our blinding tears. Mr. Thackeray was so much greater, so much nobler than his works, great and noble as they are, that it is difficult to speak of him without apparent excess. What a loss to the world the disappearance of that large, acute, and fine understanding; that searching, inevitable inner and outer eye ; that keen and yet kindly satiric touch ; that wonderful humour and play of soul 1 And then such a mastery of his mother tongue ! such a style ! such nicety of word and turn ! such a flavour of speech ! such genuine originality of genius and expression ! such an insightinto the hidden springs of human action! such a dissection of the nerves to their ultimate fibrilla I such a sense and such a sympathy for the worth and for the misery of man! such a power of bringing human nature to its essence,—detecting at once its basic goodness and vileness, its compositeness! In this subtle, spiritual analysis of men and women, as we see them and live with them ; in this power of detecting the enduring passions and desires, the strengths, the weaknesses, and the deceits of the race, from under the mask of ordinary worldly and town life,—making a dandy or a dancing-girl as real, as ' moving delicate and full of life,' as the most heroic incarnations of good and evil; in this vitality and yet lightness of handling, doing it once and for...« less