His home had been broken up by his wife's malady, and his own health was shattered.

When he was writing _Pendennis_, in 1849, he had a severe fever, and then those spasms came, of which four or five years afterwards he wrote to Mr.Reed.His home, as a home should be, was never restored to him,--or his health.

Just at that period of life at which a man generally makes a happy exchange in taking his wife's drawing-room in lieu of the smoking-room of his club, and assumes those domestic ways of living which are becoming and pleasant for matured years, that drawing-room and those domestic ways were closed against him.

The children were then no more than babies, as far as society was concerned,--things to kiss and play with, and make a home happy if they could only have had their mother with them.

I have no doubt there were those who thought that Thackeray was very jolly under his adversity.
Jolly he was.