enumeration of the number of copies sold. He was a firm reliant man,
very little prone to change, who, when he had discovered the nature of
his own talent, knew how to do the very best with it.

It may almost be said that Thackeray was the very opposite of this.
Unsteadfast, idle, changeable of purpose, aware of his own intellect but
not trusting it, no man ever failed more generally than he to put his
best foot foremost. Full as his works are of pathos, full of humour,
full of love and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and
honour and manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to
me to do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to
lack something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness
which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He
seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then to
have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that it was beyond his
power to soar up into those bright regions. I can fancy as the sheets
went from him every day he told himself, in regard to every sheet, that
it was a failure. Dickens was quite sure of his sheets.

"I have got to make it shorter!" Then he would put his hands in his
pockets, and stretch himself, and straighten the lines of his face, over
which a smile would come, as though this intimation from his editor were
the best joke in the world; and he would walk away, with his heart
bleeding, and every nerve in an agony. There are none of us who want to
have much of his work shortened now.

In 1837 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew Shawe,
and from this union there came three daughters, Anne, Jane, and Harriet.
The name of the eldest, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, who has followed so
closely in her father's steps, is a household word to the world of novel