It was quite the fashion in the village to be literary.  We had a little knot of choice spirits who assembled frequently together, formed ourselves into a Literary, Scientific, and Philosophical Society, and fancied ourselves the most learned philos in existence.  Every one had a great character assigned him, suggested by some casual habit or affectation.  One heavy fellow drank an enormous quantity of tea; rolled in his armchair, talked sententiously, pronounced dogmatically, and was considered a second Dr. Johnson; another, who happened to be a curate, uttered coarse jokes, wrote doggerel rhymes, and was the Swift of our association.  Thus we had also our Popes and Goldsmiths and Addisons, and a blue-stocking lady, whose drawing-room we frequented, who corresponded about nothing with all the world, and wrote letters with the stiffness and formality of a printed book, was cried up as another Mrs. Montagu.  I was, by common consent, the juvenile prodigy, the poetical youth, the great genius, the pride and hope of the village, through whom it was to become one day as celebrated as Stratford-on-Avon.

My father died and left me his blessing and his business.  His blessing brought no money into my pocket; and as to his business it soon deserted me:  for I was busy writing poetry, and could not attend to law; and my clients, though they had great respect for my talents, had no faith in a poetical attorney.

I lost my business therefore, spent my money, and finished my poem.  It was the Pleasures of Melancholy, and was cried up to the skies by the whole circle.  The Pleasures of Imagination, the Pleasures of Hope, and the Pleasures of Memory, though each had placed its author in the first rank of poets, were blank prose in comparison.  Our Mrs. Montagu would cry over it from beginning to end.  It was pronounced by all the members of the Literary, Scientific, and Philosophical Society the greatest poem of the age, and all anticipated the noise it would make in the great world.  There was not a doubt but the London booksellers would be mad after it, and the only fear of my friends was, that I would make a sacrifice by selling it too cheap.

Every time they talked the matter over they increased the price.  They reckoned up the great sums given for the poems of certain popular writers, and determined that mine was worth more than all put together, and ought to be paid for accordingly.  For my part, I was modest in my expectations, and determined that I would be satisfied with a thousand guineas.  So I put my poem in my pocket and set off for London.

My journey was joyous.  My heart was light as my purse, and my head full of anticipations of fame and fortune.  With what swelling pride did I cast my eyes upon old London from the heights of Highgate.  I was like a general looking down upon a place he expects to conquer.  The great metropolis lay stretched before me, buried under a home-made cloud of murky smoke, that wrapped it from the brightness of a sunny day, and formed for it a kind of artificial bad weather.  At the outskirts of the city, away to the west, the smoke gradually decreased until all was clear and sunny, and the view stretched uninterrupted to the blue line of the Kentish Hills.