as he once told me, having always been, not
the running short, but the running over: not the whip, but the drag,
that was wanted. Sufflaminandus erat, as Ben Jonson said of Shakspeare.
And in future works, with such marvelous nicety could he do always what
he had planned, strictly within the space available, that only another
similar instance is remembered by me. The third number introduced the
school; and "I remain dissatisfied until you have seen and read number
three," was his way of announcing to me his own satisfaction with that
first handling of Dotheboys Hall. Nor had it the least part in my
admiration of his powers at this time that he never wrote without the
printer at his heels; that, always in his later works two or three
numbers in advance, he was never a single number in advance with this
story; that the more urgent the call upon him the more readily he rose
to it; and that his astonishing animal spirits never failed him. As late
in the November month of 1838 as the 20th, he thus wrote to me: "I have
just begun my second chapter; cannot go out to-night; must get on; think
there _will_ be a _Nickleby_ at the end of this month now (I doubted it
before); and want to make a start towards it if I possibly can." That
was on Tuesday; and on Friday morning in the same week, explaining to me
the failure of something that had been promised the previous day, he
tells me, "I was writing incessantly until it was time to dress; and
have not yet got the subject of my last chapter, which _must be_
finished to-night."

But this was not all. Between that Tuesday and Friday an indecent
assault had been committed on his book by a theatrical adapter named
Stirling, who seized upon it without leave while yet only a third of it
was written; hacked, cut, and garbled its dialogue to the shape of one
or two farcical actors; invented for it a plot and an ending of his own,
and produced it at the Adelphi; where the outraged author, hard pressed
as he was with an unfinished number, had seen it in the interval between
the two letters I have quoted. He would not have run such a risk in
later years, but he threw off lightly at present even such offenses to
his art; and though I was with him at a representation of his _Oliver
Twist_ the following month at the Surrey theatre, when in the middle of
the first scene he laid himself down upon the floor in a corner of the
box and never rose from it until the drop-scene fell, he had been able
to