Excerpt from Stray Moments With Thackeray: His Humor, Satire, and Characters; Being Selections From His Writings, Prefaced With a Few Biographical Notes<br><br>Charter-house, the noble foundation which had fostered Addison, Steele, and some of the most famous men in English history, was selected for him, and his life here has been reflected again and again in his books. A school-mate describes him as a pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy. But he was neither too gentle nor too timid to stand up in a fight and have his nose broken nor was he by industry or apparent ability above the aver age of his fellows. In 1822 he was a tenth-form boy, and when seventeen years Old he was on the first form, and had become a monitor of the school. In the election of orators for founder's day and poets for the Charter-house Odes he was over looked. NO doubt he already had a sense of the puerile magniloquence of school-boy orations, Odes, and valedictions the spirit of burlesque was strong within him, and he was more congenially em ployed in mocking and satirizing those lofty effu sions than in emulating them.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.