Oh, you know not, may you never know, the miseries of subsisting by authorship!  ’Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or mine; but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller’s dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale, and breasts of mutton, to change your FREE THOUGHTS and VOLUNTARY NUMBERS for ungracious TASK-WORK.  Those fellows hate us.  The reason I take to be, that contrary to other trades, in which the master gets all the credit (a jeweller or silversmith for instance,) and the journeyman, who really does the fine work, is in the background:  in our work the world gives all the credit to us, whom they consider as their journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another sixpence in their mechanic pouches!...

Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep you.  Trust not to the public; you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy personage cares.  I bless every star, that Providence, not seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon the stable foundation of Leadenhall.  Sit down, good B.B., in the banking-office:  what! is there not from six to eleven p.m. six days in the week, and is there not all Sunday?  Fie, what a superfluity of man’s time, if you could think so!  Enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts.  O the corroding, torturing, tormenting thoughts, that disturb the brain of the unlucky wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance!  Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as lover’s quarrels.  I was but half in earnest.  Welcome dead timber of the desk, that makes me live.  A little grumbling is a wholesome medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and embrace this our close, but unharassing way of life.  I am quite serious.  If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it six weeks, and will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot or dog’s-ear.  You will much oblige me by this kindness.

TO THE SAME

A cold

9 Jan. 1824.

DEAR B.B.,

Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day-mare,—­’a whoreson lethargy’, Falstaff calls it,—­an indisposition to do anything, or to be anything,—­a total deadness and distaste,—­a suspension of vitality,—­an indifference to locality,—­a numb, soporifical, good-for-nothingness,—­an ossification all over,—­an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,—­a mind-stupor,—­a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience?  Did you ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to water-gruel processes?  This has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it