Of a magazine editor it is required that he should be patient, scrupulous, judicious, but above all things hard-hearted.

I think it may be doubted whether Thackeray did bring himself to read the basketfuls of manuscripts with which he was deluged, but he probably did, sooner or later, read the touching little private notes by which they were accompanied,--the heartrending appeals, in which he was told that if this or the other little article could be accepted and paid for, a starving family might be saved from starvation for a month.

He tells us how he felt on receiving such letters in one of his _Roundabout Papers_, which he calls "_Thorns in the cushion_." "How am I to know," he says--"though to be sure I begin to know now,--as I take the letters off the tray, which of those envelopes contains a real _bona fide_ letter, and which a thorn?
One of the best invitations this year I mistook for a thorn letter, and kept it without opening." Then he gives the sample of a thorn letter.

It is from a governess with a poem, and with a prayer for insertion and payment.

"We have known better days, sir.