What's the use of it all?
Oh vanitas vanitatum! Oh vanity and vexation of spirit! "So Clive Newcome," he says afterwards, "lay on a bed of down and tossed and tumbled there.
He went to fine dinners, and sat silent over them; rode fine horses, and black care jumped up behind the moody horseman." As I write this I have before me a letter from Thackeray to a friend describing his own success when _Vanity Fair_ was coming out, full of the same feeling.

He is making money, but he spends it so fast that he never has any; and as for the opinions expressed on his books, he cares little for what he hears.

There was always present to him a feeling of black care seated behind the horseman,--and would have been equally so had there been no real care present to him.

A sardonic melancholy was the characteristic most common to him,--which, however, was relieved by an always present capacity for instant frolic.

It was these attributes combined which made him of all satirists the most humorous, and of all humorists the most satirical.