He was rather a popular preacher, and used to cry a good deal in the pulpit.

He and a queer wine merchant and bill discounter, Sherrick by name, had somehow got possession of that neat little literary paper, _The Museum_, which perhaps you remember, and this eligible literary property my friend Honeyman, with his wheedling tongue, induced me to purchase." Here is the history of Thackeray's money, told by himself plainly enough, but with no intention on his part of narrating an incident in his own life to the public.

But the drollery of the circumstances, his own mingled folly and young ambition, struck him as being worth narration, and the more forcibly as he remembered all the ins and outs of his own reflections at the time,--how he had meant to enchant the world, and make his fortune.

There was literary capital in it of which he could make use after so many years.

Then he tells us of this ambition, and of the folly of it; and at the same time puts forward the excuses to be made for it.