Then he went abroad to
study art, passing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and filled
the albums of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward living
a bohemian existence in the Latin quarter at Paris, studying art in a
desultory way, and seeing men and cities; accumulating portfolios full
of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be used afterward to
greater advantage when he should settle upon his true medium of
expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of five hundred pounds a
year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_,
and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, Cruikshank's _Comic Almanac_,
_Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by
"Michael Angelo Titmarsh," _Yellowplush Papers_, and all manner of
skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the _Great
Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these were
collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish Sketch-Book_,
1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and it was not
until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity Fair_, in
monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing like the
general reputation that Dickens had reached at a bound.
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