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
readers; the second died as a child; the younger lived to marry Leslie
Stephen, who is too well known for me to say more than that he wrote,
the other day, the little volume on Dr. Johnson in this series; but she,
too, has now followed her father. Of Thackeray's married life what need
be said shall be contained in a very few words. It was grievously
unhappy; but the misery of it came from God, and was in no wise due to
human fault. She became ill, and her mind failed her. There was a period
during which he would not believe that her illness was more than
illness, and then he clung to her and waited on her with an assiduity of
affection which only made his task the more painful to him. At last it
became evident that she should live in the companionship of some one
with whom her life might be altogether quiet, and she has since been
domiciled with a lady with whom she has been happy. Thus she was, after
but a few years of married life, taken away from him, and he became as
it were a widower till the end of his days.

At this period, and indeed for some years after his marriage, his chief
literary dependence was on _Fraser's Magazine_. He wrote also at this
time in the _New Monthly Magazine_. In 1840 he brought out his _Paris
Sketch Book_, as to which he tells us by a notice printed with the first
edition, that half of the sketches had already been published in various
periodicals. Here he used the name Michael Angelo Titmarsh, as he did
also with the _Journey from Cornhill to Cairo_. Dickens had called
himself Boz, and clung to the name wit