Professor Perry on Thackeray.

Professor Bliss Perry lectured on Thackeray in Sever 11 yesterday afternoon. The lecture was the first of a series of five which will be given by Professor Perry for the benefit of the Prospect Union.

Thackeray's literary fortune has been, in one respect, unique. He founded no school of writers nor attended at any time supreme popularity, but his works have constantly increased in favor both among authors and among the reading public. To understand rightly the genius of Thackeray's writings, one must look at the world as the author himself looked at it, must understand his thoughts and know his life.

Thackeray was brought to England from India in 1816, and at the age of eleven he entered the Charterhouse School. There his life, though passed in the partial seclusion from his fellows which his gentle, timid nature chose, was not distinctive or unusual Later he entered Cambridge, then studied law for a time, studied drawing in Paris, and at length returned to London and began writing for papers and magazines.

As yet he had achieved in his work no great success and had won no name. Versatile and brilliant he was indeed, and he had gained a wide knowledge of the world and keen insight into the characters of men; but still he was merely a writer with no definite purpose, and from among the various branches of literature had not finally chosen the kind of writing which he was to make peculiarly his own. Truth in writing, that power that scorns the sham and pictures the real, Thackeray had, and a fund of brilliant humor also. He had lacked the personal and distinctive individuality that was needed to make him prominent and now for the first time, by a serious realization of his own powers, he was to achieve this.

In 1847 appeared "Vanity Fair," Thackeray's most powerful work. With terrible truth he painted the frivolous world of London society, and with scathing satire laid its nature bare. A chord of sombreness and melancholy sounds through the book, for Thackeray was not painting the world but arraigning a society in which all was indeed vanity and where the play was indeed "played out."

"Vanity Fair" was Thackeray's first great success. In truthful depiction and now in satire he had succeeded; he was then to enter, as a novelist, the third stage of his literary development. "Fun is good, truth is better, and love is best of all" he once wrote, and he was about to take up that kind of writing which mirrors the moral ideals of the world, the law of which is love. If "Vanity Fair" was Thackeray's most powerful book, "Henry Esmond" was of all his works the best and noblest. Its charm does not lie in its rich and beautiful style, nor in the strength of its plot, nor in the accuracy of its historical description, but rather in the deep and tender sympathy and comprehension of human nature that Thackeray has so marvelously expressed. In "Henry Esmond," in "Pendennis" and "The Newcomes" Thackeray showed that power which has placed him high among English writers--the power of creating in fiction, by his sincerity, by the brilliancy of his humor and the tenderness of his nature, characters that live in memory and can never die.