’Sailing with supreme dominion
    Through the azure deep of air,’

but simply as a wholesome, good-natured citizen, with whom it was always pleasant to have a chat.  I can see him now,” continued Thackeray, “leaning over a cottage gate, and tasting good Master Such-a-one’s home-brewed, and inquiring with a real interest after the mistress and her children.”  Long before he put it into his lecture, I heard him say in words to the same effect:  “I should like to have been Shakespeare’s shoe-black, just to have lived in his house, just to have worshipped him, to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet, serene face.”  To have heard Thackeray depict, in his own charming manner, and at considerable length, the imaginary walks and talks of Shakespeare, when he would return to his home from occasional visits to London, pouring into the ready ears of his unsophisticated friends and neighbors the gossip from town which he thought would be likely to interest them, is something to remember all one’s days.

The enormous circulation achieved by the Cornhill Magazine, when it was first started with Thackeray for its editor in chief, is a matter of literary history.  The announcement by his publishers that a sale of a hundred and ten thousand of the first number had been reached made the editor half delirious with joy, and he ran away to Paris to be rid of the excitement for a few days.  I met him by appointment at his hotel in the Rue de la Paix, and found him wild with exultation and full of enthusiasm for excellent George Smith, his publisher.  “London,” he exclaimed, “is not big enough to contain me now, and I am obliged to add Paris to my residence!  Great heavens,” said he, throwing up his long arms, “where will this tremendous circulation stop!  Who knows but that I shall have to add Vienna and Rome to my whereabouts?  If the worst comes to the worst, New York, also, may fall into my clutches, and only the Rocky Mountains may be able to stop my progress!” Those days in Paris with him were simply tremendous.  We dined at all possible and impossible places together.  We walked round and round the glittering court of the Palais Royal, gazing in at the windows of the jewellers’ shops, and all my efforts were necessary to restrain him from rushing in and ordering a pocketful of diamonds and “other trifles,” as he called them; “for,” said he, “how can I spend the princely income which Smith allows me for editing the Cornhill, unless I begin instantly somewhere?” If he saw a group of three or four persons talking together in an excited way, after the manner of that then riant Parisian people, he would whisper to me with immense gesticulation:  “There, there, you see the news has reached Paris, and perhaps the number has gone up since my last accounts from London.”  His spirits during those few days were colossal, and he told me that he found it impossible to sleep, “for counting up his subscribers.”