The catastrophe at Crackscull Common put an end to my summer’s campaign.  I was cured of my poetical enthusiasm for rebels, robbers, and highwaymen.  I was put out of conceit of my subject, and what was worse, I was lightened of my purse, in which was almost every farthing I had in the world.  So I abandoned Sir Richard Steele’s cottage in despair, and crept into less celebrated, though no less poetical and airy lodgings in a garret in town.

I see you are growing weary, so I will not detain you with any more of my luckless attempts to get astride of Pegasus.  Still I could not consent to give up the trial and abandon those dreams of renown in which I had indulged.  How should I ever be able to look the literary circle of my native village in the face, if I were so completely to falsify their predictions.  For some time longer, therefore, I continued to write for fame, and of course was the most miserable dog in existence, besides being in continual risk of starvation.

I have many a time strolled sorrowfully along, with a sad heart and an empty stomach, about five o’clock, and looked wistfully down the areas in the west end of the town; and seen through the kitchen windows the fires gleaming, and the joints of meat turning on the spits and dripping with gravy; and the cook maids beating up puddings, or trussing turkeys, and have felt for the moment that if I could but have the run of one of those kitchens, Apollo and the muses might have the hungry heights of Parnassus for me.  Oh, sir! talk of meditations among the tombs—­they are nothing so melancholy as the meditations of a poor devil without penny in pouch, along a line of kitchen windows towards dinner-time.

At length, when almost reduced to famine and despair, the idea all at once entered my head, that perhaps I was not so clever a fellow as the village and myself had supposed.  It was the salvation of me.  The moment the idea popped into my brain, it brought conviction and comfort with it.  I awoke as from a dream.  I gave up immortal fame to those who could live on air; took to writing for mere bread, and have ever since led a very tolerable life of it.  There is no man of letters so much at his ease, sir, as he that has no character to gain or lose.  I had to train myself to it a little, however, and to clip my wings short at first, or they would have carried me up into poetry in spite of myself.  So I determined to begin by the opposite extreme, and abandoning the higher regions of the craft, I came plump down to the lowest, and turned creeper.

“Creeper,” interrupted I, “and pray what is that?” Oh, sir!  I see you are ignorant of the language of the craft; a creeper is one who furnishes the newspapers with paragraphs at so much a line, one that goes about in quest of misfortunes; attends the Bow-street office; the courts of justice and every other den of mischief and iniquity.  We are paid at the rate of a penny a line, and as we can sell the same paragraph to almost every paper,