Secondly, Dickens, although truly of a slight, compact figure, was _not a very_ small man.

I do not think he was below the average middle height.

I speak from my remembrance of him at a later day, when I had become intimate with him; but curiously enough, I find on looking back into my memory, that if I had been asked to describe him, as I first saw him, I too should have said that he was very small.
Carlyle's words refer to Dickens's youth soon after he had published _Pickwick_; and no doubt at this period he had a look of delicacy, almost of effeminacy, if one may accept Maclise's well-known portrait as a truthful record, which might give those who saw him the impression of his being smaller and more fragile in build than was the fact.

In later life he lost this D'Orsay look completely, and was bronzed and reddened by wind and weather like a seaman.
In fact, when I saw him subsequently in London, I think I should have passed him in the street without recognising him.

I never saw a man so changed.
Any attempt to draw a complete pen-and-ink portrait of Dickens has been rendered for evermore superfluous, if it were not presumptuous, by the masterly and exhaustive life of him by John Forster.