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 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.