your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself.  They are but self extended, but pardon me if I stop somewhere.  Where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself.  Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift.  One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child—­when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me.  In my way home through the Borough I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity I gave away the cake to him.  I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me; the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect that I—­not the old impostor—­should take in eating her cake; the ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose.  I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like; and I was right.  It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after.  The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.  But when Providence, who is better to us than all our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.

Yours (short of pig) to command in every thing.

To BERNARD BARTON

A blessing in disguise

9 Jan. 1823.

’Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support, beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you’!!!

Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes.  If you have but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers.  They are Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck.  Hitherto you have been at arm’s length from them.  Come not within their grasp.  I have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers—­what not? rather than the things they were.  I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse.  You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are.  Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found them.